A Novel Polishing Process with Rigid-Flexible Composite Structure Plate and Its Performance in Polishing Sapphire Wafer
Abstract A novel flexible polishing process has been developed for sapphire wafer by using a polishing plate with rigid-flexible composite structure to satisfy the demands of excellent surface shape accuracy and high surface topography quality simultaneously. This new polishing plate was fabricated by alternately casting and curing the ring structure of soft and hard unsaturated resins. It is found that the overall stiffness of the polishing plate is improved due to the “hard support frame” of rigid-flexible polishing plate, as well as the ability of removal selectivity of the polishing plate is strengthened. The topography quality and shape accuracy of sapphire wafer polished by presented novel polishing process have been compared with those polished by conventional flexible polishing, respectively. Both experiment and simulation results are shown that the surface roughness and topographical variations of sapphire wafer polished by the novel rigid-flexible composite structure polishing plate have been greatly improved. Comparing with the conventional flexible polishing, the surface shape accuracy of the sapphire wafer polished by the presented novel polishing process can be improved by 54.1%.
