Blog post from Philippe Gastaldo, Product and R&D Director, UnitySC.
As the automotive electronics market continues to grow, spurred by developments such as semi-autonomous and fully autonomous vehicles, the demand is increasing for power semiconductor components with sophisticated conversion schemes that decrease power consumption and heat. To address these needs, power semiconductor manufacturers are turning to thin wafers.
Today’s power semiconductors are manufactured primarily on 200-mm wafers that range in thickness from 50 to 100 µm, but their roadmaps are targeting wafers as thin as 1 µm. These wafers are thinned on the backside by mechanical polishing. Defects resulting from the polishing process include grinding marks, grinding failures resulting in edge chips, star cracks and comets formed by edge particles that get caught in the grinding wheel, embedded particles, cleavage lines, and a variety of other imperfections [Evaluation Engineering].