Simulation study on physical features of a silicon substrate during stealth dicing with a constrained interpolation profile procedure

Laser processing plays a key role in treating a lot of materials. The mechanism of laser stealth dicing (SD) is based on irradiation of a laser beam which is focused inside the brittle material. The laser beam scans along the predetermined path, so that the characteristics of the interior brittle material can be changed, the stress layer can be therefore formed. Finally, an external force is applied to separate the brittle material. Since only the limited interior region of a wafer is processed by the laser irradiation, the damages and debris contaminants can be avoided during the SD process. SD has the advantages of a high speed for thinner wafers without any chipping, the smooth section without dust and slag, and completely dry process, which has been widely used in large scale integrated circuits and microelectronic manufacturing systems. However, further studies on the simulation analyze and parameter optimization have kept to be rear for SD so far. In this study, an approach named as constrained interpolation profile (CIP) was adopted, which has the advantages of compactness, stability, and low dissipation in computational fluid dynamics compared with other simulation procedures. We have finished a theoretical simulation to obtain the physical features of the temperature, pressure, density of the silicon substrate at different focal depth where a nanosecond pulsed laser is irradiated, then we found a suitable focal depth with a good dicing quality by analyzing these physical features.