DISCO Corporation has developed DDS2020, a fully automatic die separator that supports Φ200 mm tape frames and achieves separation of hard materials including SiC and sapphire. This equipment is being exhibited at SEMICON Japan 2023 (December 13-15, Tokyo Big Site).

Stealth dicingTM is a dicing process where a modified layer is formed by focusing a laser beam inside the workpiece, following which stress is applied externally to separate it into die. As silicon wafers can be separated with a relatively small amount of stress, the die can be separated by simply expanding the dicing tape. On the other hand, materials that have high mechanical strength like SiC wafers that are widely used for power devices and sapphire wafers used for LED cannot be separated just by expansion. Thus, a breaking mechanism was necessary.

DDS2020 is a die separator that achieves separation of hard materials such as SiC and sapphire with a low load using a new breaking mechanism.

Features

  • New breaking mechanism that achieves low load separation
    • Load decreased by 40% compared to the conventional breaking mechanism
  • Breaking load measurement and graph display
    • Detects unseparated die and improves the yieldAutomatic retry setting when unseparated die are detected is also available
  • Tape frame remounting for breaking is no longer necessary
    • Eliminates remounting work and reduces tape costs

Original – DISCO