Fabrication, handling and processing of wafers of intrinsically brittle and anisotropic single-crystalline GaAs require a high level of control of the material's response to different loading conditions. The present work is focused on the response to hardness indentation. A short overview on the behaviour of (100) GaAs wafers in several doping conditions over a wide range of indentation loads from nano-indentation up to macro-indentation including sharp and blunt indenters is given. Special attention is paid to the pop-in effect in depth-sensing nano-indentation, to the anisotropy of indentation-induced radial crack formation and to the material's crack resistance obtained from the indentation fracture mechanics approach. We have observed that, under certain conditions, the frequency of formation of radial cracks is essentially different for the two in-plane <110> directions. This observation is attributed to the occurrence of two different kinds of dislocations and to the lack of inversion symmetry. The effect turns out to be closely related to a left – right asymmetry in the material removal caused by wire sawing. This insight has paved the way to the optimisation of the process of wire sawing of GaAs single crystals.
Driven by the requirement of high cutting efficiency and improvement of wafer flatness, wire sawing of GaAs single crystals under brittle material removal conditions has been studied. Crack nucleation and crack propagation were investigated by indentation and scratching tests on polished {100}-oriented semi-insulating GaAs wafers. Based on these results a concept has been developed that allows to control the force balance in the cutting slits so that the deflection of the wires perpendicular to the cutting planes is minimal resulting in cuts of high flatness. The concept has been successfully introduced in mass production of GaAs wafers.
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