By Christian Fornaroli
Currently, electrical semiconductor components such as LEDs, solar cells or transistors are commonly produced in a batch process. This way, many identical components can be processed in parallel on one big wafer; subsequently, each chip has to be singulated. Mechanical sawing with diamond blades has been used for a long time, but as the wafer material gets thinner and the chip size smaller, this classical process can be replaced by laser-based dicing processes. In particular, the mechanical load and the relatively large kerf width are serious disadvantages of a mechanical dicing process. A reduction of the kerf width leads to a much higher yield of chips per wafer and, therefore, to increasing efficiency and conserving resources at the same time.