New Stress Activation Method for Kerfless Silicon Wafering Using Ag/Al and Epoxy Stress-Inducing Layers

The SLIM-cut technique provides a way to obtain thin silicon foils without a standard sawing step, thus avoiding kerf losses. This process consists of three steps: depositing a stress-inducing layer on top of the silicon surface; stress activation by heating and cooling, resulting in crack propagati...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE journal of photovoltaics 2014-09, Vol.4 (5), p.1228-1234
Main Authors: Bellanger, Pierre, Centeno Brito, Miguel, Pera, David M., Costa, Ivo, Gaspar, Guilherme, Martini, Roberto, Debucquoy, Marteen, Serra, Joao M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cooling
Furnaces
Heating
Kerf-free
Metals
Silicon
Stress
thin films
wafering
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The SLIM-cut technique provides a way to obtain thin silicon foils without a standard sawing step, thus avoiding kerf losses. This process consists of three steps: depositing a stress-inducing layer on top of the silicon surface; stress activation by heating and cooling, resulting in crack propagation in the silicon and detachment of a thin silicon layer; and a chemical cleaning to remove the stress-inducing layer. This paper describes a new stress activation method using Ag/Al and epoxy stress-inducing layers. The crack propagation is controlled along the sample length in order to avoid unwanted additional crack formation and interaction with other crack fronts. Silicon foils with thickness ranging between 50 and 130 μm were obtained with effective lifetimes between 1 and 81 μs.
ISSN:2156-3381
2156-3403
DOI:10.1109/JPHOTOV.2014.2334893