Chemical Mechanical Polishing of Glass Disk Substrates: Preliminary Experimental Investigation

Glass disk substrates are used in a wide range of portable devices because of their relatively high resistance to heat and shocks compared with aluminum substrates. Chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) is an available method to eliminate residual surface defects induced by grinding/lapping to meet final product requirements. In this work, CMP experiments with a low-cost fabric cloth pad were performed to study the effects of four key process factors on the material removal rate (MRR), flatness, and surface finish of polished glass disk substrates, and to explore the feasibility to achieve high machining efficiency, sub-nanometric surface roughness, and micrometric flatness of polished glass disk substrates simultaneously under optimized CMP conditions. The experimental results and analyses reveal that the interaction of pad rotational speed and polish head rotational speed had significant effect on the roughness (Ra), down force, and the interaction of down force and pad rotational speed had significant effects on the flatness, and down force and pad rotational speed had significant effects on the MRR. After compromise and prioritization analyses are performed, a combination of the four variables, which is the combination of 50g/cm2 for down force, 40rpm for pad rotational speed, 20rpm for polish head rotational speed, and 100ml/min for slurry supply velocity, is obtained to achieve high machining efficiency, sub-nanometric surface roughness and micrometric flatness of polished glass disk substrates simultaneously.