A Facile One-Pot Synthesis of δ-MnO2 Catalyst for Efficient Chemical Mechanical Polishing of SiC Wafer

Chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) of SiC wafer is a lengthy and costly process due to its extreme harness and chemical inertness. Adding small amount of nanocatalyst in CMP slurry is a simple way of improving CMP performance without adding too much cost. Herein, δ -MnO 2 nanoparticles were prepared by simply mixing ethanol and KMnO 4 solution at ambient environment and used directly for CMP experiment. The whole preparation procedure required nothing but beakers and stirring bars and produced zero waste discharge. Material removal rate of Si-face SiC wafer was increased substantially from 0.96 μm h −1 to 1.30 μm h −1 with only 1.5% addition of δ -MnO 2 catalyst. Besides phase structure, other physiochemical properties of MnO 2 catalyst, like oxygen vacancy, average oxidation state, surface area, and porosity made the real determining contribution to the enhanced oxidation kinetics and material removal rate. This simple and economic preparation of high performance δ -MnO 2 catalyst has great potential for large scale application which may significantly reduce processing time, cost and environmental impact of the current CMP of SiC wafer,