[labnetwork] Dicing sapphire wafer

[Demis D. John]

We commonly have that issue with thick (≥400µm) sapphire.
Even with good water jet cooling (critical to check that alignment), large
grit blades (or the vitreous blades you're using), and slow cut speeds -
the blades still break every ~8-15 cuts (we got this many cuts per blade
with various experimentation).
Disco did say those vitreous blades are supposed to last longer than
resnoid, but we didn't have enough demo blades to really test it out
efficiently, and didn't yet find parameters where they are outlasting our
resnoid blades.

A common solution include half-cutting the wafer (going only halfway into
the wafer), then full-cutting the wafer on a separate pass.  We still have
to set the program to check the blade every 1-2 cuts, as it wears and
breaks eventually, and it takes a *very* long time to complete the wafer in
this way, so we just do full-cutting and change blades when it wears down
too much (via automatic checking on our ADT) - it was actually faster this
way for us, but I guess it potentially consumes the resnoid blades faster.
-- Demis (contact info <https://wiki.nanotech.ucsb.edu/wiki/Demis_D._John>)
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On Fri, Jul 14, 2023 at 4:57 PM Ningzhi Xie <nzxie at uw.edu> wrote:

> Dear College,
>
> I am using the DISCO DAD 321 Wafer Dicing Saw and VT07 SD400 blade to dice
> a 460μm sapphire (Al2O3) wafer. It seems the wafer is too hard that I get
> into trouble of frequently breaking the dicing blade. I have tried lowing
> the spin speed to 12000rpm, the cutting speed to 1mm/s, and only cut into
> half of the wafer (230μm) but still got the blade broken. I am wondering if
> you have any good suggestions on sapphire wafer dicing.
>
> Thank you very much.
>
> Best regards,
> Ningzhi Xie
> Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
> University of Washington
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