Ultrashort pulse laser slicing of wide bandgap 4H-SiC crystal

Silicon carbide (SiC) is one of the key materials for electric power devices, because it has excellent characteristics of wide band gap semiconductors. Because the production cost of crystalline SiC of high quality is very high, it is desirable to slice a large SiC ingot into as many thin SiC substrates as possible. It is difficult to slice SiC crystals without wire kerf-loss by a conventional method using a wire-saw. The loss of the SiC crystal is typically over 70 %. In this study, we applied ultrafast laser processing to slicing of SiC single crysal with lower loss instead of smart-cut process[1], We have succeeded to achieve exfoliation of 4H-SiC single crystal with a loss of less than 30 μm thickness.