Corporate Environmental Report

Product and technologies

Accelerate our efforts to design products for decreased energy consumption, and to enable more efficient applications, to reduce energy consumed during operations by a factor of more than ten by year 2,000.

As a broad range semiconductor manufacturer, ST recognizes its responsibility towards Design For Environment. The constant aim is to manufacture products that are inherently less power-hungry and/or which enhance energy efficiency during their application.

Our products already contribute directly to a cleaner environment. In the automotive sector, for instance, microelectronics applications inside the engine management system reduce pollution by influencing ignition, fuel injection and consumption and exhaust emissions. Peak and hold injector drivers, stepper motor drivers and Lambda sensor interfaces are other examples.

Microelectronics also decrease the energy consumption in domestic appliances. In air conditioning units, for instance, ST's Fuzzy logic chips reduce the energy used by almost 30%.

Smart chips used in lighting decrease energy consumption and extend the life of fluorescent tubes, while microcontrollers improve a customer's ability to control the power consumption of domestic appliances.

In television stand-by mode applications, ST's power-saving chips enable savings of approximately 7 watts per unit. If this is applied to the television sets sold throughout the world in one year, savings can amount to the equivalent of the annual output of a large power station.

An ad hoc Corporate Environmental Working Group has developed a model to determine the average energy consumed by our products in operation. For logic and memory chips, we are on target to achieve our goal of a factor ten reduction relative to 1994 by the year 2,000.
For power chips, where the applications are usually well optimized and their performances are more in the hands of system rather than silicon designers, we are close to our goal.

LIFE CICLE ASSESSMENT (LCA)
The LCA is a process which evaluates the environmental burdens associated with a product. This is done by identifying the energy and materials used and the wastes released to the environment so that improvement can be made.

The assessment covers the entire life cycle of the product.

At ST, major efforts were dedicated to an important step of this process, termed Life Cycle Inventory (LCI). This is an objective databased process of quantifying all relevant mass and energy input and output flows in the manufacturing of our products - including air emissions, water effluents, solid wastes and other releases to the environment.

In 1998 this exercise was performed both for our front-end wafer fabs and back-end test and assembly operations. The final report was supplied to one of our key customers who is performing a complete LCA study for one of its products.

We will continue to perform Life Cycle Inventories to enable us to make a Life Cycle Assessment of our products (two representative studies have already been performed). We will continue to provide this information to our customers so that they may make the same environmental assessment for the final product.