Tribological Study on Photocatalysis-Assisted Chemical Mechanical Polishing of SiC

Silicon carbide (SiC) is widely used as a power semiconductor substrate material, even if it takes a large amount of processing time to secure an appropriate surface as a wafer for devices after chemical mechanical polishing (CMP). Therefore, studies on SiC CMP have focused on shortening the processing time by increasing material removal efficiency. Among the methods of SiC CMP that have been widely studied recently, the photocatalysis-assisted CMP (PCMP) method is known to efficiently increase the material removal rate (MRR) of SiC under UV light and photocatalysts. However, a limited number of comparative studies have been conducted on PCMP from a tribology perspective. In this article, a comparative study was conducted from a tribology perspective on CMP, mixed abrasive slurry CMP (MAS CMP), and PCMP. The experimental results demonstrated that SiC PCMP has higher friction and processing temperature than MAS CMP and general CMP, which may be caused by photocatalytic oxidation and the TiO2 particles used as photocatalysts.