Cleavage Fracture Phenomenon in Silicon Chips with Wafer Grinding-Induced Scratch Marks

The present work shows how the flexural displacement-induced fracture strength of silicon devices, whose back surfaces have wafer grinding-induced scratch marks, depends on the crystallographic orientation. Experimental results indicate that silicon devices with scratch marks parallel to their lateral direction (i.e. reference axis in this work) are very susceptible to flexural fracture, as compared to devices with marks which deviated from the direction. The 3-point bending test shows that the fracture strength of silicon devices having marks which are oriented away from the reference axis is 2.6 times higher than that of devices with marks parallel to the axis. It was particularly interesting to see that silicon devices with identical preferred marks even reveal different fracture strengths, depending on whether the marks are involved in specific crystal planes such as {111} or {011}, called cleavage planes. This work demonstrates that silicon devices with the reference axis-aligned scratch marks not existing on such cleavage planes can have higher fracture strength approximately 20% higher than those existing on the planes.

웨이퍼 그라인딩 공정으로 생성된 스크래치 마크를 갖는 실리콘 칩들에서의 벽개 파괴현상