The separation of chips on a silicon wafer with mechanical saws is increasingly difficult with wafers becoming ever thinner. The TruMicro 5250 microprocessing laser, on the other hand, separates chips in a contact-free manner and with no material loss at the edges of the cut. In Figure X, you can see the cutting of a silicon wafer. The high edge quality yields a higher resistance to breakage.

This significantly reduces production rejects, saving production costs.

As structure sizes get smaller, and integrated devices such as transistors get closer together, insulating dielectrics need to get thinner as well. These thin inter-level dielectrics cause capacitive losses proportional to their dielectric constant k. Silicon dioxide is the material that is commonly used, and has a relatively high dielectric constant of k=4. Using materials with the same thickness but a lower dielectric constant (“low-k materials”) results in higher chip performance with less power consumption compared to silicon oxide.
The low-k materials are typically more brittle and have a lower adhesion than silicon
dioxide. For the wafer dicing process, this increases the risk of chipping and delamination
of the low-k layers when using a blade saw. Using ultrashort pulsed lasers permits high speed and high quality scribing of these low-k layers without the drawbacks of a mechanical treatment. This low-k scribing can either be combined with a subsequent full laser wafer cut or with dicing by blade saw.