The growing semiconductor industry uses abbrasive slurries in their chemical mechanical polishing process. Those abbrasives contain valuable minerals and losses can be significant leading to adverse financial and environmental impacts as the lost material needs to be replaced and is lost instead of reused.
“Recovery processes are not very advanced, technologies can be costly or performance low. It is, however, somewhat understandable as recovering e.g. valuable ceria requires more than just standard effort. Circularity inherently leads to increasingly complicated separations, that cannot be solved with conventional technologies abundantly available in the market”, describes Riina Salmimies, CEO of Sofi Filtration.
The Sofi Filter® carries multiple benefits being automatically and mechanically self-cleaning. No chemicals are needed and the separated solids can actually be recovered, which is uncommon for other clarifying filters, such as disposable filters that occupy a large share of the market.
“Our filters provide a unique way to recover valuable solids.”
Sofi Filtration is joining the sustainability efforts of the semiconductor industry with their new ambitious R&D project, RecoVal, funded partly by Business Finland. By employing their Sofi Filter®, Sofi Filtration targets a 70% recovery of the valuable ceria used in polishing slurries. The ultimate target is ceria reuse and tools for resource efficiency for the growing semiconductor industry.
Chip Zero is an innovation ecosystem led by Picosun, an Applied Materials company and supported by Business Finland. Chip Zero aims to create the first semiconductor ecosystem in Finland with a mission to develop chips with zero lifetime emissions. The aim is to lower the deposition emissions of semiconductor manufacturing by 50% and increase the handprint of chips by double digit percentages by 2030, thus leading to an overall zero lifetime emission.