In recent years, diamond has emerged as not only a girl’s best friend, but also as contender as an engineer’s best friend – if the technical challenges of exploiting its remarkable properties can be overcome.

The wafers used to make semiconducting chips for electronic devices all have one thing in common – they need to be smooth – super smooth.

According to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $84 billion during the second quarter of 2015 – an increase of 1.0% over the previous quarter.

For many years, the wafer finishing process has been subject to an element of manual monitoring and control. With a typical wafer lapping and polishing cycle taking around an hour of conditioning to complete, the level of manual monitoring required is a drain on resource and efficiency.

The electronic materials industry is changing, with process complexity driving growth in the slurries and pads used in chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP) processes.

Almost everywhere you looked at Semicon West in San Francisco this year, semiconductor manufacturers were discussing the increased complexity of the products they are now designing.

If controlling Total Thickness Variation (TTV) is critical to your wafer thinning or polishing process; then it is imperative that the wafer be bonded to a support carrier disc (substrate) to control bond thickness consistency and dimensional accuracy.

As a result of the extensive and demanding applications for GaAs wafers, there are strict industry requirements for flatness, which typically needs to be within ±2 μm. Another vital parameter that must be controlled is TTV (total thickness variation) – the difference between the maximum and …

During the lapping and polishing of fragile wafers such as those composed of gallium arsenide (GaAs), precisely monitoring and controlling the flatness of the lapping plate is crucial throughout the entire process. Any flatness error in the lapping plate will be reflected in the sample being …