Sustainable electronics: On the trail of reconfigurable computing

• This is the first paper that present the reduction of electronic products by using reconfigurable architecture.
• This paper provides a large study of electronic products life cycle.
• This paper provides valuable information on electronic products environmental impacts during manufacturing, use and end of life.
• This paper presents example of pioneer works to illustrate the architecture of sustainable reconfigurable computing system.
• This paper should become a reference for works on sustainable electronic.

The electronics industry today is not yet green and/or sustainable. Indeed, the microelectronics industry is a consumer of primary materials, chemical products, water and energy. The manufacture of electronic products and their disposal at the end of their lives results in large quantities of waste products of varying degrees of toxicity that are difficult to deal with. Due to their high replacement rate, the lifespan of electronic products is spectacularly short. To reduce the environmental impact of electronic products the usual reduce-reuse-recycle (3R) trilogy appears to be insufficient. To achieve the objective of sustainable electronics, in this paper we suggest adding a fourth R for reconfigure. We recommend the use of the reconfiguration capacities of reconfigurable circuits such as FPGAs to reduce the functional obsolescence of electronic products by updating hardware. This paper is a survey of the sustainability of microelectronic. It presents some examples of pioneer works to illustrate the architecture of sustainable reconfigurable computing systems.