Electronic waste, or e-waste, is piling up so fast that no one can properly dispose of it. Recyclers process more than 1.5 billion pounds of electronics equipment annually. The International Association of Electronics Recyclers (IAER) says that the enormous volume of end-of-life electronics from all industry sectors will require its members to grow their capacity by a factor of four or five by the end of this decade.
An estimated 250 million PCs will become obsolete in the next five years. Mobile phones, which the IAER projects will be discarded at a rate of about 130 million a year by 2005, will result in 65,000 tons of waste, much of it toxic. "These are significantly larger quantities than had been forecasted in the past," states an IAER study released last year.
Smaller doesn't help. The rapid introduction of increasingly miniaturized (and upgraded) consumer electronic products has simply sped up the replacement of older devices, most of which are being trashed rather than recycled.
A report produced last year by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition suggests that if all consumers decided to throw out their obsolete computer at the same time, the country would face a "tsunami" of e-scrap (Fig. 1). Much of the coalition's research is contained in the report Poison PCs and Toxic TVs, released in 2001 by California Against Waste (CAW), a nonprofit grassroots organization representing more than 24,000 Californians. During a seminar on electronic recycling at the recent International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Mark Murray, CAW's executive director, was asked what kind of job the industry was doing to control hazardous waste. His response: "I wouldn't say Silicon Valley is a leader in this area." That's slowly changing.
GETTING THE LEAD OUT
Most of the problem comes from the materials used by the industry. These include lead, halogenated compounds, antimony oxides, and other toxic materials found in most semiconductors; chemicals used in the manufacture of electronic products; and the hundreds of tons of plastics used to produce PCs, cell phones, PDAs, electronic games, instruments, and other electronic products.
In 2001, the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the semiconductor engineering standardization body of the Electronic Industries Association (EIA), defined lead-free solid-state devices as those containing no more than 0.2% by weight of elemental lead. JEDEC then introduced a revised standard (IPC/JEDEC J-STD-020B) to ensure that IC packaging meets the increased board assembly and reliability requirements that arose when lead content was cut back in terminations, solder balls, and plating finishes. But technical standards covering the use of lead and other toxic materials are murky, and requirements vary by country and company.
As for the devices themselves, K.H. The, director of package development for QuickLogic, says there's no difference in terms of the functionality of leaded and lead-free packages. "However, if you put a lead-free part on a board, the conditions that the part sees as it's being mounted are very different," The says. "It is more severe in the environment. So, the whole material set in assembling the part has to be changed."
A new packaging technology now under development at Anadigics will enhance its products' moisture-sensitivity-level (MSL) ratings for increased manufacturing flexibility. The novel laminate-based packaging technology for RF packages reportedly surpasses the latest JEDEC performance requirements by providing Level 3 MSL (MSL 3). In addition, the company recently announced the development of an RF module packaging capability that meets European and Japanese regulatory requirements for lead-free devices.
National Semiconductor began to reclassify its MSL for 260°C in 2000, a process aimed at providing customers with more information as its packages moved to higher reflow temperatures for board assembly. National says most of its products are now lead-free (except for solder), and it expects all products to be lead-free this year with enhanced MSL performance. National also now bans the use of other substances in its products, including polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), cadmium, mercury, and chromium.
Actel Corp. offers leaded as well as lead-free packages. "We do that because customers are just now adopting lead-free devices, and it will take them a while to get them into their systems," says Cindy Newell, the company's customer marketing manager. "If another vendor isn't yet supplying a lead-free product, they can't use our lead-free devices."
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