The company says it has created a “specialised pattern removal technique” to erase the etchings on a silicon wafer in such a way that the wafer can be used to then manufacture silicon-based solar panels.
The semiconductor wafers are thin discs silicon material used to imprint patterns that ultimately become semiconductor chips for computers, mobile phones, video games and other consumer electronics.
The new process has already been awarded the 2007 Most Valuable Pollution Prevention Award from The National Pollution Prevention Roundtable (NPPR).
Previously, waste silicon wafers would be crushed and disposed of as landfill material.
IBM said it intends to provide details of the new process to the broader semiconductor manufacturing industry. The process is currently in use the Burlington Vermont facility and in the process of being implemented at IBM's East Fishkill semiconductor fabrication plant in New York.
“One of the challenges facing the solar industry is a severe shortage of silicon, which threatens to stall its rapid growth,” said Charles Bai, chief financial officer of ReneSola, one of China's fastest growing solar energy companies.
“This is why we have turned to reclaimed silicon materials sourced primarily from the semiconductor industry to supply the raw material our company needs to manufacture solar panels,” Mr Bai said.
IBM says that Semiconductor Industry Association research put the number of silicon wafers started every day worldwide at 250,000. Of these, about 3.3 per cent are scrapped – meaning that over a year about three million wafers are simply discarded.
Because the wafers contain intellectual property, most of these cannot be sent to outside vendors to reclaim, and are instead crushed and send to landfills, or melted down and resold.
"IBM’s commitment to environmental conservation spans its business, from the re-purposing of materials used in semiconductor manufacturing to enabling customers to manage, measure, and run the most power efficient datacenters on the planet,” IBM Semiconductor Solutions general manager Mike Cadigan said.
“The engineering ingenuity that IBM has demonstrated in pioneering the wafer-to-solar panel program has generated countless other conservation initiatives in our manufacturing operations,” Mr Cadigan said.
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