Study on Polishing of Polycrystalline AlN Using Sol–Gel Polishing Tool

Abstract

Polycrystalline aluminum nitride has extensive application prospects in substrate materials, insulating layer materials, and packaging materials. Polycrystalline aluminum nitride is sintered from powder. The traditional mechanical polishing method is easy to cause aluminum nitride grains to fall off to form pits. In this paper, to improve the polishing effect, based on the hydration of polycrystalline aluminum nitride, a sol-gel (SG) polishing tool was proposed to polish polycrystalline aluminum nitride. The polishing process was divided into rough polishing and fine polishing. The diamond particle size of the SG tool used for rough polishing was <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$40\mathbf {\mathrm {\mu }}\text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> . The diamond particle size of the SG tool used for fine polishing was <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$5\mathbf {\mathrm {\mu }}\text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> . Moreover, the polycrystalline AlN was processed with or without deionized water. The results showed that in the rough polishing stage, the material removal rate (MRR) of the polishing method without deionized water was four times higher than that of the polishing method with deionized water. However, in the fine polishing stage, the MRR of the polishing method with deionized water was slightly higher than that of the polishing method without deionized water. The results showed that mechanical removal is the primary material removal method in the rough polishing stage. In the fine polishing stage, hydration can improve the polishing effect of polycrystalline aluminum nitride.