Grinding behavior of silicon wafer and sintered Al2O3 by constant-force-feeding grinding system

Excessive forces acting on grinding surfaces cause defects on specimen during grinding. Removal depth and table feeding rate are the only controlling factors for a conventional grinding system. A new grinding system is proposed modifying the feeding process to maintain feeding force constant instead of feeding rate. Forces of a grinding wheel on a specimen are easily controlled by the present method. We used 4 inch Si wafer and sintered Al2O3 (25 mm X 50 mm) to evaluate grinding forces, table-feeding rate for a given feeding force and ground defects. We found that the forces to grind sintered Al2O3 and Si wafers behave in different way. The table-feeding rate decreases as feeding depth increases. Estimating the energy required to remove a given volume of specimen, i. e., specific grinding energy, shows a constant curve for any given feeding depth. Surface roughness was evaluated by confocal laser microscopy, and did not change for different amounts of feeding depth from 1 μm to 50 μm. Finally, we could grind the silicon wafer from 0.5 mm thickness to 40 μm and the sintered-Al2O3 from 1 mm thickness to 40 μm by only one-step of grinding in less than 50 min. We found that the constant grinding force system allow to minimize defects. Copyright (2003) AD-TECH - International Foundation for the Advancement of Technology Ltd