Products in use

We are focusing our attention on three aspects of product stewardship: energy saving products, chemical content of our products, and military use of our products.

Energy saving products | EN26 | STPR1 |

Shipments in 2006 were over 250 million products designed and used for energy saving applications. This represents about 4% of our sales. Estimated savings are approximately 1,200GWh, which is equivalent to a 140MW power plant operating 24hours a day and 7 days a week. Assuming that our products have a life time of at least 2 years, this means that the energy consumption of our manufacturing plants is totally compensated by the energy savings achieved thanks to our products in their application.

Some concrete examples

Using electronic techniques instead of electromechanical methods results in reduced operating power. Examples include almost anything that contains an electrical motor, as well as domestic and industrial lighting, water and electricity metering, etc. We develop products specifically optimized to reduce power consumption in the end application:

• TV amplifiers

Changing from Class B to Class D amplifiers improves energy consumption by 1.2W per device. With some 60 million products sold up to 2006 and assuming an average use of 2.5 hours per day, this is equivalent to an 8MW saving.

• Mobile phone charger

With a stand-by feature, the same kind of calculation on 300 million units sold per year leads to 49,000GWh saved per year. Assuming the same result over the years, the saving would be 17MW.

• LED drivers

ST recently introduced the first high-brightness LED drivers to include auto-power-saving features. This product was specifically designed to support all worldwide energysaving programs which encourage power efficiency in lighting applications.

In lighting, signage and transport applications, it allows a savings of 80% compared to existing solutions.

Material declaration | PR1 | STEV78 | STEV79 |

As a consequence of the RoHS Directive, more and more customers are now requesting us to provide the detailed material content of our products. While we understand and support the need for a precautionary approach to avoid health or environmental problems due to uncontrolled use of chemical products, the implementation of a robust system to communicate reliable information to our customers is not trivial. One of the main issues (faced by all semiconductor companies) is to get the appropriate information on the detailed chemical content of the materials we buy from our suppliers (such as molding compound, glues, etc.) because in many cases this information is part of their intellectual property, and as such is protected by patents. We plan to solve this problem within the next few months, which will allow us to provide the requested information to our customers.