[labnetwork] Dicing glass/quartz or alumina with Disco DAD3240 saw

[N Shane Patrick]

Hello Mario,

Blade breakage with harder materials is always a challenge, but we’ve found Disco’s engineers to be quite responsive to dicing challenges and suggestions to solve them.

For our in-house cutting on our DAD321, we’ve found different blades are needed for glass vs. Quartz/sapphire.

We usually source our blades directly from Disco rather than thermocarbon (though we’ve used them in the past). Our current recommendations for the most common materials are the following:

Silicon: ZH05 series

Glass/Quartz: R07 series

Sapphire: VT07 series


We’ve also found switching to a multipass cutting strategy can help with harder/thicker materials. We also dice on Blue Tape for the vast majority of this work.

My personal experience with bending/breaking has been that the blade is likely not rigorous enough to stand up to the hardness of the material being cut, so a slight deflection seems to become unrecoverable and eventually the blade deviates enough to break. I would, again however, strongly suggest getting in touch with Disco to discuss your particularly challenges and needs as, again, we’ve had very good response from them. I’m afraid I don’t have much in the way of direct recommendations, however, if you need to continue using thermocarbon blades.

Good Luck.

N. Shane Patrick
Manager, Lab Operations and Safety
Electron Beam Lithography
Washington Nanofabrication Facility (WNF) 
National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI)
University of Washington - NanoES
Fluke Hall 129, Box 352143
(206) 221-1045
patricns at uw.edu <mailto:patricns at uw.edu>
http://www.wnf.washington.edu/ <http://www.wnf.washington.edu/>

> On Sep 9, 2021, at 3:52 PM, Beaudoin, Mario <beaudoin at physics.ubc.ca> wrote:
> 
> We are having issues with cutting glass/quartz or alumina wafers with our Disco DAD3240 dicing saw
> We’re using composite Thermocarbon blades @ 20K rpm and tried feed speeds ranging between 0.5-5 mm/sec. Sample thickness varies but even for thinner ones (500-700 um) we’re having a problem that the blade breaks. Looks like the blade trajectory is bending during the cut and this causes catastrophic damage to the blade. Why this bending occurs is not clear. Maybe the problem is in the blue tape we use to secure samples, but we don’t observe any apparent displacement of the sample on the film. 
> 
> Anyone else having similar issues?  Any suggestions?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Mario
> 
> -- 
> <Mario Beaudoin SBQMI sig 2.jpg>
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