Wafer Manufacturing

6Diamond‐Impregnated Wire Saws and the Sawing Process

Wafer manufacturing encompasses a plethora of processes and machine tools to produce prime wafers for microelectronic fabrication, as presented in Chapter 2 of this book. Included in wafer manufacturing processes are crystal growth, wafer forming, wafer polishing and wafer preparation. Modern slurry wiresaws and technology are introduced in Chapter 4, with a comparison to the inner‐diameter (ID) saws. Today, wiresaws have become the most common machine tool for slicing ingots of various materials including silicon, sapphire, silicon carbide, and other crystalline materials into wafers for various applications, including semiconductor, photovoltaic, and mobile phones. It was only very recently that the diamond wire saws became a competitive technology to slurry wiresaws as a result of improvements in materials technology and of bonding diamond abrasive grits being placed onto the circumferential surface of a wire with very small diameter. In this chapter, diamond‐impregnated wire saws (commonly referred to as simply the diamond wire saws) will be introduced and presented.

6.1 Introduction

Diamond wire saws have been used in stone slicing since 1978 [Huang et al. (2009)]. In this application of stone quarrying, diamond beads with abrasive grits on them are mounted on a steel wire with spacers, as illustrated in Figure 6.1. The beads are impregnated with diamond grits as abrasives. The motion of the steel wire, which carries ...