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Experimental and theoretical analysis of single-sided and double-sided chemical mechanical polishing of sapphire wafers

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Abstract

Sapphire is widely used as a new generation of optoelectronic chips. In this article, single-sided chemical mechanical polishing (SS-CMP) and double-sided chemical mechanical polishing (DS-CMP) were conducted polishing experiments on sapphire wafers. Polishing pressure, relative rotational speed, and polishing time were investigated on material removal rate (MRR), surface roughness (SR), and parallelism of sapphire wafers under the two methods. The results demonstrate both MRR and SR of DS-CMP are significantly better than SS-CMP under the same parameters. Sapphire DS-CMP can obtain a relatively stable average MRR increment of 14.016 nm/min comparing to SS-CMP and can also obtain better surface quality when subjected to greater polishing pressure. Additionally, the parallelism after SS-CMP is about 3 times that of DS-CMP under one-time processing. Finally, sapphire CMP material removal equations are established empirically and theoretically to demonstrate the exponential equation of nonlinear relationship is more suitable for the material removal of sapphire CMP, and the mean error between the theoretical and experimental results of SS-CMP and DS-CMP is within 10%, providing a quantitative and efficient solution for manufacturing sapphire wafers.

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Funding

This work was supported by the Special Fund for the Construction of Hunan Innovative Province (Grant No.2020GK2003), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. U1809221), and Scientific Research Foundation of Hunan Provincial Education Department of China (Grant No.19A163).

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Zhongyang Li: methodology, conceptualization, visualization, formal analysis, writing—original draft. Zhaohui Deng: resources, writing—review and editing, supervision, project administration. Jimin Ge: writing—review and editing. Tao Liu: writing—review and editing. Linlin Wan: writing—review and editing, supervision, project administration.

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Correspondence to Zhaohui Deng.

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Li, Z., Deng, Z., Ge, J. et al. Experimental and theoretical analysis of single-sided and double-sided chemical mechanical polishing of sapphire wafers. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 119, 5095–5106 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-021-08404-5

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