Reducing the environmental footprint of electronics and computing devices requires new tools that empower designers to make informed decisions about sustainability during the design process itself. This is not possible with current tools for life cycle assessment (LCA) which require substantial domain expertise and time to evaluate the numerous chips and other components that make up a device. We observe first that informed decision-making does not require absolute metrics and can instead be done by comparing designs. Second, we can use domain-specific heuristics to perform these comparisons. We combine these insights to develop DeltaLCA, an open-source interactive design tool that addresses the dual challenges of automating life cycle inventory generation and data availability by performing comparative analyses of electronics designs. Users can upload standard design files from Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software and the tool will guide them through determining which one has greater carbon footprint. DeltaLCA leverages electronics-specific LCA datasets and heuristics and tries to automatically rank the two designs, prompting users to provide additional information only when necessary. We show through case studies DeltaLCA achieves the same result as evaluating full LCAs, and that it accelerates LCA comparisons from eight expert-hours to a single click for devices with ~30 components, and 15 minutes for more complex devices with ~100 components.

翻译：减少电子和计算设备的环境足迹需要新的工具，使设计师能够在设计过程中就可持续性做出明智决策。当前的寿命周期评估工具无法实现这一目标，因为它们需要大量的领域专业知识和时间来评估构成设备的众多芯片及其他组件。我们首先观察到，明智的决策并不需要绝对指标，而可以通过比较设计来实现。其次，我们可以利用领域特定启发式方法进行这些比较。我们结合这些见解开发了DeltaLCA，这是一个开源交互式设计工具，通过执行电子设计的比较分析来解决生命周期清单自动生成和数据可用性的双重挑战。用户可以上传来自电子设计自动化软件的标准化设计文件，该工具将引导他们确定哪个设计的碳足迹更大。DeltaLCA利用电子专用LCA数据集和启发式方法，尝试自动对两个设计进行排序，仅在必要时提示用户提供额外信息。通过案例研究，我们证明DeltaLCA能够获得与完整LCA评估相同的结果，并且对于包含约30个组件的设备，可将LCA比较从专家耗时8小时加速至一键完成，对于包含约100个组件的更复杂设备，则仅需15分钟。