Design and Fabrication of a Manual Precision Chip Dicer for Laboratory Use

摘要

In most university laboratories, semiconductor devices are fabricated on small pieces of wafers measuring a few cm×cm. The highly oriented and polished crystals or heterostructures grown by Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) are expensive, often they require specialised growth sequences that may not even be commercially available.Tightly packed arrays of devices are fabricated on substrates, maximising the use of the available surface area. An obvious consequence of this is that, very little space is left between two neighbouring rows or columns. In the penultimate step each device needs to be separated out ("chip dicing"). A sharp cutting tip, that can be positioned accurately within an error of typically less than 5 micron and then moved in a straight line for a few cm, with negligible lateral jitter is required. In large scale chip manufacturing, automated dicing machines are used. These are not suitable for university laboratories due to high costs and operating overheads. Hence we have desired and fabricated "tabletop" chip dicer that can give the required accuracy.