《Innovative Optical Technique Speeds Up LED Wafer Scribing Production》.doc

Innovative Optical Technique Speeds Up LED Wafer Scribing Production Leon Chen, Robbie J.Z. Lee,*Todd Lizotte * Hitachi Via Mechanics USA, Inc., Emerging Technology Group, 4 Delta Drive, Suite 6, Londonderry, NH 03053 ABSTRACT Laser scribing technology was introduced in LED wafer singulation four years ago and has been gaining significant success. But as GaN/Sapphire wafers keep shrinking the LED chip size (8mil) yet continue to remain on a 2 wafer size, laser process engineers face heavy pressure from the LED industry to further increase throughput. Since raising laser power degrades the performance of GaN, a process engineer cant just substitute a higher power laser and expect quicker throughput. Even if the scribing speed can be increased with a higher powered laser, the efficiency on throughput wont be significant because of the small wafer size and enormous amount of dicing streets. In order to efficiently utilize a more powerful laser, beam splitting optic need to be employed to?scribe the wafer with simultaneous multiple beams. During production we used a triple beam design and found that even scribing at one-third the speed, we can get more than 30% increase in throughput. How this technique adapts into this application will be presented in this paper, as well as the challenges encountered under a real production environment. ? Keywords: Scribing, Dicing, LED, Laser, Beam Splitter, Shaping, Diffractive, DPSS, Wafer INTRODUCTION Blue LED is fabricated by GaN grown on a sapphire substrate. Because of the hardness of sapphire and the LED’s industries unstopped demands of cost reduction, UV lasers were introduced for scribing GaN/Sapphire chips. Scribing with UV lasers was initially proposed in the early 90’s [1][8] as UV laser sources began to proliferate, however its been the development of blue LED’s that have popularized the use of UV scribing laser applications. Because of the difficulty of growing GaN over an area greater then 2, the LED producers nee