Processing Single Crystal SiC with Semi-Consolidated Polishing Film

Single crystal SiC has been considered as a leading wide band gap semiconductor for its excellent properties even in severe environments. While the outstanding chemical and mechanical inertness also makes it a difficult to process material. In this work, a flexible machining method was proposed to polish 6H-SiC wafers with semi-consolidated diamond tools prepared by sol-gel technology. To confirm the machining mechanism of this newly developed method, free abrasive polishing slurry and fixed abrasive lapping film were also used for comparative experiments. The results indicated that high quality wafer surface with roughness of Ra 0.962 nm was achieved by using semi-consolidated polishing film with diamond grit size of 1 μm. And compared to the other two machining methods, the abrasive in this flexible tool would take a retraction when polishing, leading to a smoother and scratch-free surface of the work piece.