What is Chemical Mechanical Polishing or CMP Polishing?
Chemical Mechanical Polishing, more commonly known as CMP Polishing, is a process whereby the top surface of a wafer is polished with the aid of a slurry containing an abrasive grit suspended within reactive chemical agents.
The polishing action is partly mechanical and partly chemical. The mechanical element of the process applied downward pressure while the chemical reaction that takes place increases the material removal rate and this is usually tailored to suit the type of material being processed.
Chemical Mechanical Polishing Applications
Logitech's chemical mechanical polishing systems are highly versatile and are designed for use in polishing applications where geometric precision and surface quality are of paramount importance.
All our equipment can be tailored by using different carrier heads, polishing templates, wet bench modules or end point detection allowing you to customise your system to your needs.
Specific application areas where our CMP systems can be used include:
- Silicon Wafer CMP
- Global CMP of III-V Compound Semiconductors
- Global CMP of Silicon Nitride, Oxides & Polymer Layers
- Global CMP of brittle, friable IR material substrates
- Global CMP of Sapphire, Gallium Nitride & Silicon Carbide substrates
- Reclamation of EPI ready substrates
- Final stage thinning of SOS and SOI wafers to below 20 microns
- Device delayering for reverse engineering of FA applications
Chemical Mechanical Polishing Solutions
Logitech's chemical mechanical polishing systems offer nanometer level material removal capabilities on either individual die or on wafers up to a maximum of 300mm diameter and can be used with the wide variety of wafer / substrate materials used in current day device fabrication processes.
They achieve industry standards of control and layer removal for chemical mechanical polishing and produce laser quality surfaces (0/0 scratch dig), making improvements to surface topography and can also achieve Ra to subnanometer levels on substrates. These benefits help make our solutions ideal research and development or test and measurement tools.
Further features and benefits of our chemical mechanical polishing systems include:
- In process diamond conditioning
- Process both hard and soft materials
- Wide range of wafer sizes catered for
- High downward load settings available
- Back pressure settings for better process results
- End point detection available to monitor polishing in real time
Process Results
Batches of 20 wafers were run for each of the following materials to help show that differences between each single wafer being processed using the Tribo and Orbis Chemical Mechanical Polishing Systems are minimal:
- Silicon Oxide
- Copper
- Silicon Nitride
- Aluminium Copper Mix
- Silicon Germanium
- Tungsten
By adjusting the process parameters, it is possible to program the chemical mechanical polishing system to produce similar results to higher volume systems. This helps to make the unit an ideal choice for running R&D trials prior to transferring the finished process route to higher capacity systems.
Furthermore, these results demonstrate that the repeatability of WTWNU and WIDNU can be maintained at 3%.
Chemical Mechanical Polishing Technical Papers
"Considerations of R&D scale CMP processing and it’s use in novel applications"
This paper attempts to show how a small scale chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) system can be utilised in an R&D environment to test new innovative custom prepared CMP slurries, templates, conditioning tools and pads without requiring extensive cleaning procedures and impractical change-over times from run to run. It will also show how savings on cost of ownership gained by relatively low consumable consumption are obtained due to the reduced working envelope.
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For more information on our chemical mechanical polishing systems and solutions and what Logitech technology will do for your business, call us on +44 (0)1389 875444 or complete our contact form.