  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.
