Ablation Free Dicing of 4H-SiC Wafers with Feed Rates up to 200 mm/s by Using Thermal Laser Separation

This paper presents Thermal Laser Separation (TLS) as a novel dicing technology for sil-icon carbide (SiC) wafers. Results of this work will play an important role in improving the SiC dicing process regarding throughput and edge quality. TLS process parameters were developed for separating 4H-SiC wafers. Separated SiC dies were analyzed and compared with results pro-duced with current state of the art blade dicing technology. For the first time, fully processed 100 mm 4H-SiC wafers with a thickness of 450 μm, including epi-layer and back side metal lay-ers, could be separated with feed rates up to 200 mm/s. Besides the vastly improved dicing speed, the TLS separation process results in two important features of the separated SiC devices: First, edges are free of chipping and therefor e of higher quality than the edges produced by blade dicing. Second, the TLS process is kerf free, which allows for reducing the necessary dicing street width and hence increasing the number of devices per wafer.