Making chemical vapor deposition green and sustainable for thin film making

Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is a commonly used method to produce thin films, used in electronics, engineering, and medical applications. However, in most cases, currently used CVD practices are not sustainable.

Pedersen et al. offer a perspective on principles for a sustainable “Green CVD” philosophy. The authors hope these principles can be developed by the research community and establish new techniques for making CVD more sustainable.

The authors discuss several current CVD practices, with examples, which are energy-intensive, time-consuming, and, in some cases, extremely hazardous.

Alarmingly, recent findings indicate that energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are increasing as more advanced manufacturing methods are introduced at different technology dimension nodes. For example, the 2-nanometer process technology scheduled for high volume production in 2024 uses more energy than the mature 28-nanometer process technology introduced in 2011.

Sustainable CVD technology is important to help battle climate change. The authors hope a new research area can spring from this paper, where researchers from engineering, physics, and chemistry come together and work towards making CVD processes more sustainable.

“We want to challenge the CVD community to start to think about how the CVD processes can be made more sustainable without sacrificing the quality of the product made by CVD or the productivity of the CVD process,” said co-author Henrik Pedersen.

In future work, authors expect to start working with experts in academia and industry to develop a model for the sustainability of CVD processes.

Source: “Green CVD–towards a sustainable philosophy for thin film deposition by chemical vapor deposition,” by Henrik Pedersen, Seán T. Barry, and Jonas Sundqvist, JVST:A (2021). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1116/6.0001125 .