Abstract
Si wafers are widely used as a substrate material for fabricating ICs. The quality of ICs depends on the quality of Si wafer. The Chemo-mechanical Grinding (CMG) process with soft abrasive wheel has been found recently to be a great potential process for machining silicon to generate superior surface quality at low cost. However, to the author knowledge no detail studies on whether new extra scratches be introduced in CMG process or not are reported. There have been very few studies on observing changes of topography of scratches and understanding basic mechanism of elimination of elimination of scratches without introducing new scratches and removal of grinding textures / marks generated by diamond grinding wheel using CMG process without inducing new surface damages. Therefore, a series of experiments have been conducted to study the elimination of surface scratches created on etched wafer surface and grinding residual textures induced by diamond wheel in CMG process. Under all experimental conditions and process, the CMG process exhibited better performance and no new extra scratches were introduced.
