Life cycle impact assessment of semiconductor packaging technologies with emphasis on ball grid array

Abstract

Environmental impact assessment studies have completely and rapidly focused on the shift from economic to environmental competitiveness in semiconductor packaging industries under the trend of small size and diverse semiconductor products. This study has two main objectives, namely, (1) to adopt traditional life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) for investigating the environmental damage of three packaging technologies, namely, ball grid array (BGA), flip chip (FC), and lead frame (LF). Two commonly used materials in 2017, namely, gold and copper wires, were analyzed. The functional unit was defined on the basis of the packaging volume (1 mm3); (2) to identify influential parameters for developing two parametric LCIA equations for the BGA. Results show that the semiconductor back-end industry should gradually replace gold wires with copper wires without affecting the function of products and should promote the low impact packaging technology (LF) while satisfying the customer’s demands. Tree influential parameters (packaging volume, wire mass, and lead counts) of LCIA are identified by regression analysis, and the lead count can be considered a worthwhile alternative parameter for allocation and establishing the parametric tool when the packaging volume of the product is unavailable. The parametric tool can reduce the time cost of collecting LCI data and avoid the analysis errors and uncertainty caused by the distribution. The research can serve as a guide for the PCRs (LCA-PCR) of the semiconductor industry for suitable alternative allocation principles and functional units.