Cost-Efficient High-Throughput Polishing of Silicon Carbide Seed Crystals

Abstract

Polishing of Silicon Carbide (SiC) seed crystals and substrates to achieve an extremely smooth, level surface, and an optically clear finish takes many surface finishing steps with very long processing times producing a significant amount of slurry waste and utilizing numerous lapping and polishing machines. This paper presents a newly developed cost-efficient SiC polishing process which reduces these operations to two surface finishing steps for achieving an optically clear finish on monocrystalline SiC material where the same size of diamond abrasives for lapping and polishing steps allows to carry out stock removal lapping and polishing processes on a single platform (machine) without concern of cross-contamination and making it as a very cost-efficient and high-throughput polishing process for SiC seed crystals and substrates.