PC World – Big Blue Goes Green, Recycling Silicon
PC World – Big Blue Goes Green, Recycling Silicon
IBM announced Tuesday that it has created a process allowing its manufacturing facilities to repurpose otherwise scrap semiconductor wafers.
Since the silicon wafers need to be nearly flawless in order to be used in computers, mobile phones, video games and other consumer electronics, the imperfect ones are normally erased with acidic chemicals and discarded. IBM had been sandblasting theirs to remove proprietary material. Some of the pieces, called “monitors,” are reused for test purposes.
The new process cleans the silicon pieces with water and an abrasive pad leaving them in better condition for reuse. The entire process to clean an 8-inch wafer is about one minute. Eric White, the inventor of the process, said that IBM can now get five or six monitor wafers out of one that would have been crushed and discarded. The cleaned wafers can also be sold to the solar-cell industry, which has a high demand for the silicon material to use in solar panels. White said that shortage would need to be “extreme” to use the wafers in consumer electronics and that IBM does not plan to do so.
