ABSTRACT In this study, two chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) wastewaters were treated by crossflow electro-microfiltration. Also studied are the effects of operation parameters on their treatment efficiencies. In the semiconductor industry, presently, CMP has become the key technique to provide global planarization on interlevel dielectrics (ILD) and metal layers of wafers. In general, the post-CMP cleaning process will produce a great quantity of CMP wastewater. Normally, CMP wastewater consists of abrasives of high concentration and stability, chemicals (e.g., oxidant and surfactant), and a tremendous mass of de-ionized water. Because of the negatively charged suspended solids in CMP wastewater, crossflow electro-microfiltration was used to treat this type of wastewater. By applying an electric field to the system, the negatively charged suspended solids were expelled from the membrane surface moving toward the anode. Not only reducing the cake formation on the membrane, enhancement of the filtration rate and permeate flux have also been found when an external electric field is applied to the filtration system. In this investigation, CMP wastewaters obtained from wafer fabs A and B were first characterized by various standard methods. In CMP wastewater A, the suspended solids were found to have a high negative zeta potential, about ¡V78 mV. Its electrical conductivity was determined to be 127.2 £gS/cm. Before testing, each CMP wastewater was pre-filtered using a filter paper of 1.2 £gm in pore size. An experimental design based on the Taguchi method was employed. The L9 orthogonal arrays were utilized to investigate the effects of four experimental factors ( i.e., electric field strength, crossflow velocity, transmembrane pressure, and membrane pore size) on the filtration rate and permeate quality in the crossflow electro-microfiltration system. When the electric field strength applied was lower than the critical electric field strength, increases of the electric field strength, transmembrane pressure, and membrane pore size were found to be beneficial to the filtration rate. The experimental results were further subjected to the analysis of variance and regular analysis. For both CMP wastewaters A and B, the electric field strength and membrane pore size were determined to be very significant parameters. In this filtration system, the optimal treatment efficiency could be achieved by using a higher electric field strength, lower crossflow velocity, higher transmembrane pressure, and larger membrane pore size. The quality of permeate thus obtained was even better than the tap water quality standards. Therefore, the permeate might be worth recycling for various purposes.