Vertical Spindle Grinding of Si and Granite with a New Abrasive Disk

Yiqing Yu,Jianyun Shen,Juan Liu,Bin Kuang,Xipeng Xu

doi:10.1155/2013/768104

Abstract

An investigation was reported of a new attempt in the fabrication of an ultrafine abrasive tool for vertical spindle grinding. The principle of sol-gel was applied to granulate ultra-fine abrasives in order to reduce their aggregation. The granulated abrasives were then added to resin bonds, thereby forming ultra-fine abrasive grinding disks. Before grinding, the disks were dressed to expected flatness using a brazed diamond pad. The dressed grinding disks were then used to grind silicon wafers and natural granite. Both dressing and grinding were conducted on a high precision vertical spindle grinding machine. After grinding, the morphologies of the workpiece materials were examined. With regard to the different concerns for silicon wafers and granite, surface roughness was measured for the silicon wafers and gloss readings were measured for the granite surfaces. It was found that the brazed diamond abrasives could dress the grinding disks with high efficiency and satisfactory flatness. The new ultra-fine abrasive disks were found to be able to process silicon wafers and granite slabs to acceptable results.

Highlights

Grinding with ultrafine abrasive tools is one of the most widely used processes for precision machining of many materials such as ceramics, glass, natural stone materials, and novel materials used in the semiconductor industry [1,2,3,4]
It needs to note that the roughness values (Ra) is as low as 15 nm for the grinding with 5 μm abrasives, which might be comparable to the results reported by some published studies on the grinding of silicon wafers with fixed abrasives
The combination of sol-gel granulation and resin bonding was found to be possible in manufacturing ultrafine abrasive tools for fine grinding of silicon wafer and granite

Summary

Introduction

Grinding with ultrafine abrasive tools is one of the most widely used processes for precision machining of many materials such as ceramics, glass, natural stone materials, and novel materials used in the semiconductor industry [1,2,3,4]. As a result of random distribution of ultrafine abrasives in the bonds, it is quite difficult to control the precision and surface quality of components during grinding with ultrafine abrasives. Nakamura et al proposed a new method to fabricate ultrafine abrasive tools using the principle of sol-gel [6]. The sol-gel technique was found to be effective in granulating ultrafine abrasives of diameter greater than 5 μm [8]. As an attempt to fabricate ultrafine abrasive tools for grinding, the present work was undertaken to combine the granulating ability of sol-gel with the bonding ability of resin. It is hoped that the results obtained in this work will be of benefit to the development of high-performance ultrafine abrasive tools for high precision and cost-effective grinding

Fabrication of a New Grinding Disk

Dressing of the Grinding Disk

Grinding of Silicon Wafer and Granite with the Dressed Disk

Conclusions