A Study on Pressure Distribution for Uniform Polishing of Sapphire Substrate

Total thickness variation (TTV), BOW, and surface roughness are essential characteristics for high quality sapphire substrates. Many researchers have attempted to increase removal rate by controlling the key process parameters like pressure and velocity owing to the high cost of consumables in sapphire chemical mechanical polishing (CMP). In case of the pressure approach, increased pressure owing to higher deviation of pressure over the wafer leads to significant degradation of the TTV. In this study, the authors focused on reducing TTV under the high-pressure conditions. When the production equipment polishes multiple wafers attached on a carrier, higher loads seem to be concentrated around the leading edge of the head; this occurs because of frictional force generated by the combination of table rotation and the height of the gimbal of the polishing head. We believe the skewed pressure distribution during polishing to be the main reason of within-wafer non-uniformity (WIWNU). The insertion of a hub ring between the polishing head and substrate carrier helped reduce the pressure deviation. Adjusting the location of the hub ring enables tuning of the pressure distribution. The results indicated that the position of the hub ring strongly affected the removal profile, which confirmed that the position of the hub ring changes the pressure distribution. Furthermore, we analyzed the deformation of the head via finite element method (FEM) to verify the pressure non-uniformity over the contact area Based on experiment and FEM results, we determined the optimal position of hub ring for achieving uniform polishing of the substrate.