Casio First in the Industry to Adopt COF as Cleaning Agent for TFT LCD Manufacturing Process

Casio First in the Industry to Adopt COF as Cleaning Agent for TFT LCD Manufacturing Process Total elimination of NF to help ease global warming Global warming factor of new gas 10,000 times lower

Tokyo, June 29, 2005—Kochi Casio Co., Ltd., a TFT LCD production company in the Casio Group, has been preparing to switch the cleaning agent used in its manufacturing process from NF (nitrogen trifluoride) to COF (carbonyl difluoride). COF has been shown effective in helping to reduce global warming. With the company’s announcement today that it has fully completed the changeover, it became the first in the industry to adopt COF as the cleaning agent for its TFT LCD manufacturing, as well as the first to use it in a semiconductor mass production plant. The entire Casio Group is committed to global environmental protection. Casio’s eco-friendly products (Casio Green Products) are designed to have a low impact on the environment, thanks to their “compact, lightweight, slim, and energy efficient” technology. Casio is also working to improve its environmental performance in the electronic components sector, which has a generally greater environmental impact than the electronics sector. The new cleaning agent will be used for Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) devices employed in the TFT array process, which creates the semiconductors on glass substrates. Conventional NF cleaning agent, though it has an ozone layer depletion factor of zero, has a global warming coefficient ten thousand times greater than that of carbon dioxide (CO ). COF not only has an ozone layer depletion factor of zero, but also has a global warming factor of only one, the same as CO . Compared to NF , COF represents a huge step forward in terms of reducing the global warming impact. Moreover, since COF is just as good as NF in terms of cleaning effectiveness, and a waste gas burner is no longer needed, Casio expects this move to be effective for reducing CO emissions, as well, and also for saving energy in the TFT manufacturing process. The Casio Group will continue to take initiatives like this in the future, as it strives to further reduce the environmental impact of all of its operations. *COF was selected as an optimal replacement material during the Semiconductor CVD Cleaning Equipment Project, carried out by the Japanese government between 1998 and 2003.

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