System and method for polishing and planarizing semiconductor wafers using reduced surface area polishing pads and variable partial pad-wafer overlapping techniques

摘要

A system and method for polishing semiconductor wafers includes a variable partial pad-wafer overlap polisher having a reduced surface area, fixed-abrasive polishing pad and a polisher having a non-abrasive polishing pad for use with an abrasive slurry. The method includes first polishing a wafer with the variable partial pad-wafer overlap polisher and the fixed-abrasive polishing pad and then polishing the wafer in a dispersed-abrasive process until a desired wafer thickness is achieved.