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The growth
of the personal computers in the global marketplace and processing
speeds has resulted in advances being made to increase the size of the
silicon wafers that are the semiconductors' fundamental raw material.
To support these efforts, the silicon ingot slicing process is rapidly
switching from inner diameter blade-saw (ID saw) to the wire-saw
method.
ID saw is a traditional method of slicing silicon ingot slicing that
applied to 200mm or less diameter wafer process. As the figure shows,
ID  saw is made
from 4~5 times width of ingot diameter steel sheet, therefore as the
the size of the silicon wafers increase to 300mm or larger, this
method becomes difficult to apply. Besides, ID saw can only cut ingot
slice by slice.
Today, the wire saw method is being used to cut larger wafers as the
demand on larger wafer increases. The wire saw technique can also
cut an ingot into many wafers at a time with high quality surface
finish. It is also capable of producing much thinner wafer. All these
translate into higher productivity and cost efficiency.
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