Bottom-Up Life-Cycle Assessment of MEMS Piezoresistive Pressure Sensors

Delhaye, Thibault [UCL] Le Brun, Grégoire [UCL] Flandre, Denis [UCL] Raskin, Jean-Pierre [UCL]

The manufacturing of modern silicon-based MEMS requires highly energy- and resource-intensive processes. Understanding and gathering objective data of the impacts of silicon manufacturing is crucial to select design strategies reducing the environmental impacts. In this work, we present a bottomup assessment of the embodied energy and carbon footprint of two piezoresistive pressure sensors, by adapting previously published LCA data set to model the sensors process sheets. Then we use these models as generic models of pressure sensors processes to discuss their environmental impacts regarding their performances. Our results highlight that using Silicon-on- Insulator (SOI) substrates and deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) as release process could lead to a 50-fold reduction of the environmental impacts of MEMS pressure sensors regarding to their specifications.