Firstly, the history of WEDM in human history is briefly introduced
2000 BC: ancient Egyptians cut stones with ropes mixed with water and sand
19th century: Italians cut marble with ropes
60s of the 20th century: the use of reciprocating motion of lines to cut crystal pieces appeared
1970's: cutting 1-2 inch silicon wafers with reciprocating motion of wire
Before the 1980s, when people cut superhard materials, they usually used diamond powder coated internal cutting machine for cutting. However, with the rapid development of the semiconductor industry, it is difficult for people to meet the existing production efficiency. At the same time, due to the great material loss of the internal cutting, under the effect of Moore's law of the cost of the semiconductor industry, people have higher and higher requirements for reducing the cutting cost and improving the efficiency. Therefore, multi wire cutting technology is gradually developed.
The basic principle of multi wire cutting is that a high-speed steel wire drives the cutting edge material attached to the steel wire to rub the silicon rod, so as to cut the silicon rod and other hard and brittle materials into thousands of thin sheets at the same time. Due to the advantages of smaller cutting loss and higher precision, multi wire cutting has great advantages for cutting expensive and superhard materials. In recent ten years, it has replaced the traditional internal cutting as the main method of silicon wafer cutting.
Before 2003, multi wire cutting mainly met the needs of the semiconductor industry. The cutting technology was mainly mastered in Europe, the United States, Japan, Taiwan and other countries and regions. The domestic semiconductor business was mainly packaging business. The upstream wafer cutting technology was far behind the developed countries and regions, and the related equipment manufacturing research and development was difficult to make progress.
In 2003, with the explosive growth of solar photovoltaic industry, the silicon wafer cutting business of domestic private enterprises developed rapidly. A large number of NC multi wire cutting equipment made in Switzerland and Japan are introduced. Domestic equipment manufacturing enterprises have also seen this huge business opportunity, and have invested capital, manpower and material resources in technology research and development. But most of them are still based on imitation.
In 2009, some manufacturers began to try to introduce the steel wire cutting technology used in other industries, such as sapphire cutting, into the silicon wafer cutting field.
