The National Research Institute and Dingji Technology co-develop laser polishing for mass-producing silicon carbide wafers.

2025/07/09

TechNews Technology News
June 24, 2025
Author Emma stein

In response to the growing demand for high-performance electronic components such as electric vehicles, 5G, and low-orbit satellites, the National Instrument Technology Research Center (NITRI) of the National Research Institute and Dingji Technology have cooperated to jointly develop the key technology of "Infrared nanosecond laser applied to silicon carbide wafer grinding process", successfully improving the grinding rate and quality of silicon carbide wafers, and reducing process costs and material losses.

Silicon carbide (SiC) is one of the most promising power semiconductor materials. It has excellent properties such as high voltage tolerance, high thermal conductivity, and high chemical stability. It has replaced silicon wafers and become the first choice for core component materials such as automotive power and drive systems, solar photovoltaic inverters, charging piles, and industrial control equipment.

However, when making wafers with silicon carbide, difficulties often arise in the "grinding" step. Due to the extremely high hardness of silicon carbide (Mohs hardness 9.2), traditional grinding methods have caused bottlenecks in processing efficiency and quality yield. It is not only time-consuming and has a lot of grinding losses, but also because of mechanical processing, it is easy to leave damage marks on the surface of the wafer, and even cause the entire wafer to break, seriously affecting the wafer yield and increasing manufacturing costs. Therefore, the industry generally regards the back-end process of silicon carbide wafers as a bottleneck for mass production.

To solve this problem, the National Instrument Center of the National Research Institute and Dingji Technology have successfully introduced an infrared nanosecond pulse laser system and developed a "laser grinding technology" designed specifically for the mass production needs of silicon carbide wafers. By hitting the surface of silicon carbide 100,000 times per second to soften it, the grinding time of each wafer can be shortened from 3 hours to 2 hours without damaging the wafer. The wafer breakage rate has dropped from 5% to 1%, greatly improving the product yield, mainly improving the two processes of wafer grinding/polishing, wafer thinning and cutting.

The new technology can reduce the loss of wafers caused by the grinding process, and also significantly reduce the consumables (diamond grinding wheels, water, oil, etc.) and machine cleaning and maintenance costs required for traditional grinding. The cost of bare wafer grinding consumables has dropped from US$23 to US$0.1, while avoiding the diamond particles used in mechanical grinding from being controlled by China, the main producing country.

The National Research Institute further pointed out that the new technology has another advantage, which is to reduce the hardness of silicon carbide wafers from about 3000 HV to 60 HV, greatly reducing the subsequent processing time and cost.

Currently, Dingji Technology has cooperated with the Czech plant of US chip manufacturer ON Semiconductor Corp. to promote the machine to Europe.

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