Surface Texture Analysis of Fixed and Free Abrasive Machining of Silicon Substrates for Solar Cells

Abstract

Multi-wire sawing process has been widely used for wafer slicing of silicon substrates for solar cells. Usually there are two different kinds of wire saw in multi-wire sawing process including free abrasive wire sawing with SiC grits and fixed abrasive wire sawing with diamond wire. For free abrasive wire sawing process, the material removal mechanism can be considered as lapping and the fixed abrasive wire sawing can be considered as grinding. This paper is to investigate the characteristics of the surface texture of silicon substrate fabricated by these two wire sawing process. Experimental results have been observed by white light interferometry and SEM. Some different properties of both processes have compared been with variant characteristics including 2-D and 3-D surface roughness parameters. Results of this paper can be further used to evaluate the feasibility of wire sawing process of silicon substrates for solar cells.