Citation
Casquel del Campo, Rafael and Holgado Bolaños, Miguel and García-Ballesteros Ramírez, Juan José and Zinoviev, K. and Férnandez-Sánchez, C. and Sanza Gutiérrez, Francisco Javier and Molpeceres Álvarez, Carlos Luis and Laguna Heras, Maria Fe and Llobera, A. and Ocaña Moreno, José Luis and Dominguez, C.
(2011).
UV laser-induced high resolution cleaving of Si wafers for micro-nano devices and polymeric waveguide characterization.
"Applied Surface Science", v. 257
(n. 12);
pp. 5424-5428.
ISSN 0169-4332.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apsusc.2010.11.021.
Abstract
In this work we propose a method for cleaving silicon-based photonic chips by using a laser based micromachining system, consisting of a ND:YVO4laser emitting at 355 nm in nanosecond pulse regime and a micropositioning system. The laser makes grooved marks placed at the desired locations and directions where cleaves have to be initiated, and after several processing steps, a crack appears and propagate along the crystallographic planes of the silicon wafer. This allows cleavage of the chips automatically and with high positioning accuracy, and provides polished vertical facets with better quality than the obtained with other cleaving process, which eases the optical characterization of photonic devices.
This method has been found to be particularly useful when cleaving small-sized chips, where manual cleaving is hard to perform; and also for polymeric waveguides, whose facets get damaged or even destroyed with polishing or manual cleaving processing. Influence of length of the grooved line and speed of processing is studied for a variety of silicon chips. An application for cleaving and characterizing sol–gel waveguides is presented. The total amount of light coupled is higher than when using any other procedure.
