Analysis of Patents on the Recycling Technologies for the Waste Silicon Sludge

Silicon wafer is used in making semiconductor device of various forms in the semiconductor industry. Silicon wafer is produced by cutting silicon ingot and sludge containing silicon results from cutting process. The amount of silicon sludge is increasing owing to the usage of semiconductor device in many industry sectors. These days the recycling technologies of the waste silicon sludge has been widely studied from view point of economy and efficiency. In this study, patents on the recycling technologies of the waste silicon sludge were analyzed. The range of search was limited in the open patents of USA, European Union, Japan, and Korea up to september, 2007. Patents were collected using key-words and filtered by filtering criteria. The trend of the patents was analyzed by the years, countries, companies, and technologies.