From the crystal rod to the substrate, sapphire substrates must undergo various procedures, including slicing, double-sided grinding, rough polishing, and fine polishing [1]. After CMP polishing, the sapphire substrate will be transferred to an external extension for epitaxy. The sapphire substrate has a thickness of approximately 430 µm. Due to sapphire's poor thermal conductivity, an increase in temperature in the LED's active region will have a catastrophic effect on the light output characteristics and service life of the sapphire substrate [2]. To improve the thermal performance of the sapphire material, the sapphire substrate is back-thinned to less than 100 m following the electrode preparation procedure [3, 4]. Sapphire substrate back thinning is accomplished mostly through grinding and lapping procedures, and following thinning, ultra-precise polishing is necessary to obtain a surface of high quality with minimal damage [5].
Double-side lapping and polishing is a common ultra-precision processing technique that has been widely applied to the ultra-precision processing of various flat components, such as sapphire substrates, quartz wafers, silicon wafers [6]. Kasai[7] utilized a two-plane machining strategy to analyze CMP machining of rigid disks. They constructed a model of the trajectory and relative motion velocity of single abrasive grains for double-side polishing, and combined it with a material removal model that optimized the uniformity of material removal from the upper and lower surfaces. Kim [8] employed diamond cemented grinding discs mixed with Al2O3 abrasive to machine sapphire using a dual plane machining process. They discovered that the combined action of diamond and Al2O3 caused sapphire material removal. Observing the experimental results of sapphire, Wang [9] analyze the relative movement between workpiece and abrasive grit, and establish a mathematical model on the basis of the double-sided planetary grinding machine. Li [10, 11] conducted orthogonal experiments on double-sided CMP of sapphire wafers, studied the effects of different processing parameters on material removal rate, surface roughness, and depth of SSD, and adopted the optimization method of orthogonal experimental results based on weight matrix, and obtained the effect of each factor on The influence degree of the index value of the orthogonal experiment was compared, the processing results of sapphire wafers under different processing methods were compared, and the material removal equation based on experience and theory was established. Wang [12] examined the effects of grinding pressure, grinding wheel speed, and grinding wheel grit on the surface precision and machining efficiency, approximately obtaining 10 m/min in material removal rate.
With the increasing in the LED business, greater demanding has been placed on the quality of sapphire wafers. For ultra-thin sapphire wafer preparation, double-side polishing technique is the chosen polishing method due to its excellent flatness and parallelism, as well as its high polishing efficiency [13]. However, the majority of commercially available double-side polishing equipment is of the planetary wheel type, which suffered a clamping issue such as insufficient strength and rigidity of the planetary wheel cage, which leads to the runaway and fragmentation of wafer and severely reduces processing efficiency [14]. Current methods for clamping sapphire wafers include vacuum adsorption [15], paraffin bonding [16], planetary wheel clamping [17], and wax-free adsorption pad [18]. Vacuum adsorption uses negative pressure formed between the workpiece and the porous ceramic to adsorb the ultra-thin flat workpiece to the fixture. However, the negative pressure will cause local deformation in the ultra-thin workpiece surface, and the surface flatness of the ultra-thin workpiece is unsatisfying after processing [19–21]. The widely used clamping method for thinning substrate is paraffin bonding [22]. However, in order to take down the wafers, wafers holder must be heated for melting wax after processing and then wafers must be cleaned clearly for a long time, which is not conducive to enhance processing efficiency. As the thickness of flat workpieces is typically tiny, the requirements in material of wand wheel are stringent. At present, only the blue steel wand wheel can handle ultra-thin flat workpieces, and the cost was high. The wax-free adsorption pad can cause a partial vacuum with the porous structure within the polyurethane pad [23]. Then, combining with the sealing effect of liquid droplets, the workpiece can be adsorbed on the wax-free pad, but the employed polishing pad was too soft to grip ultra-thin wafer. Therefore, there is still no viable solution for solving clamping problem of the ultra-thin sapphire wafer. In addition, the investigation on processing sapphire wafer is now focused on the process optimization [24–26], the discussion on the clamping issue was rarely carried out. To further improve the polishing efficiency of ultra-thin sapphire wafers, we propose a novel clamping method for ultra-thin wafers based on the layer stacked clamping (LSC) [27]. The adhesion mechanism and the numerical model of adhesion force were studied, and the validity of the adhesion model was verified through experiments.
To further discuss the characteristics of this method, this paper will be presented from the aspects of friction force with different baseplate materials, the effect of baseplate thickness and flatness, and the polishing results with the LSC method and traditional clamping method.