Characterization of ELID grinding process for machining silicon wafers

Silicon is widely used as a substrate material in fabricating micro electronic devices. The electrolytic in-process dressing (ELID) grinding process has been found to be an efficient process for machining silicon to generate superior surface qualities. There have been, however, very few studies on understanding basic mechanism of the ELID process and to the authors knowledge no detail studies for observing changes of wheel surface condition and their corresponding performance in machining silicon wafers is reported. Therefore, a wide variety of experiments have been conducted to study the generated grinding wheel surface, the consequent grinding performance and ground surface qualities. Under all experimental conditions, the ELID grinding process exhibited better performance compared to the conventional grinding process. The ELID grinding process especially at intermediate range of experimental conditions showed significantly improved dressing and grinding performance with superior ground wafer surface and subsurface qualities.