Scribing and cutting a sapphire wafer by laser-induced plasma-assisted ablation

Transparent and hard materials such as sapphire are used for many industrial applications as optical windows, hard materials on mechanical contact against abrasion, and substrate materials for opto-electronic semiconductor devices such as blue LED and blue LD etc. The materials should be cut along the proper shapes possible to be used for each application. In case of blue LED, the blue LED wafer should be cut to thousands of blue LED pieces at the final stage of the manufacturing process. The process of cutting the wafer is usually divided into two steps. The wafer is scribed along the proper shapes in the first step. It is inserted between transparent flexible sheets for easy handling. And then, it is broken and split in the next step. Harder materials such as diamonds are usually used to scribe the wafer, while it has a problem of low depth of scribing and abrasion of the harder material itself. The low depth of scribing can induce failure in breaking the wafer along the scribed line. It was also known that the expensive diamond tip should be replaced frequently for the abrasion. (omitted)