Evaluation of Diamond Wires for Silicon Wafer Production

In recent years the number of diamond wires on the market increased with the importance of the diamond wire process for silicon wafer production. These wires differ in many parameters and no optimum is known yet. For a wafering company the detailed wire parameters are less important as long as the wire produces high quality wafers with low wire consumption. This work therefore presents an evaluation of ten diamond wires that focuses on wafer quality in terms of wafer total thickness variation. It is shown that this evaluation should be valid for various wire saws, several changes of the sawing parameters and both mono- and multicrystalline silicon. Furthermore the potential wire consumption for the production of multicrystalline silicon wafers with a Meyer Burger DS 271 wire saw and PEG 200 as coolant is estimated to be below 2 m/wafer.