Among five Intel Environmental Awards presented in 2002 was one to a project group at the Los Alamos National Lab named SCORR—Supercritical CO2 Resist Removal. Traditional semiconductor manufacturing requires relatively large quantities of super-pure water plus various strong acids and an array of halogenated hydrocarbons. Infact, one study determined that manufacturing a laptop uses more resources and generates more waste than the assembly of a car.
Supercritical CO2 (in liquid form) has proven to be an excellent solvent with none of the adverse handling problems of halogenated solvents. It used for such processes as extracting caffeine from coffee. In wafer processing, it is used with much smaller amounts of cleaning agents and requires no super-pure water. Using only about 5% of the reactive chemicals used previously, the CO2 process has improved chip qualities with much less handling hazards.
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