Finite Element Analysis on Soft-Pad Grinding of Wire-Sawn Silicon Wafers

Silicon is the primary semiconductor material used to fabricate microchips. The quali microchips depends directly on the quality of starting silicon wafers. A series of proce are required to manufacture high quality silicon wafers. Surface grinding is one of processes used to flatten the wire-sawn wafers. A major issue in grinding of wirewafers is the reduction and elimination of wire-sawing induced waviness. Severa proaches (namely, combination of grinding and lapping, reduced chuck vacuum, sof and wax mounting) have been proposed to address this issue. Finite element an modeling of these approaches was conducted and the results were published ear was shown that soft-pad grinding was a very promising approach since it was effective in reducing the waviness and very easily adopted to conventional grindin vironment. This paper presents a study of finite element analysis on soft-pad grind wire-sawn silicon wafers, covering the mechanisms of waviness reduction and the e of pad material properties. @DOI: 10.1115/1.1649243 #