What is DMP (Diamond Mechanical Polishing)?
- Method of creating a reflective surface
- The polishing media typically consists of fine-grained or submicron abrasive particles in combination with a liquid.
- Polishing is a "wet" process.
- Often, the polishing process uses a pad to hold the abrasive so that polishing cannot be a "loose sanding process."
- Very little material is removed during polishing, usually measured in microns.
- The surface condition of the workpiece to be polished must be high quality before the polishing process. SiC machining usually involves a wire sawing process.
- Different polishing processes can be combined to optimize the CoO across the entire process chain.
- DMP is used in the SiC area as a pre-process for the CMP step
How diamond mechanical polishing works
- DMP uses a polishing pad and a polishing agent with diamond abrasives.
- The loose diamond grains introduced into the process by the polishing agent are embedded in the flexible polishing pad.
- The embedded diamond grains produce a machining process that largely eliminates scratches and unevenness from the preliminary processes.
- The carrier fluid of the polishing agent transports chips and heat out of the process area.
- The liquid carrier material in the polishing agent helps to reduce polishing agent consumption and enables uniform, controlled application in the process area.
- The result of the diamond polishing process is an enormous improvement in the flatness, parallelism, and roughness of the workpieces.
- As diamond has the highest Mohs hardness (10) of all materials, it is primarily used to process other hard materials where conventional abrasives reach their physical limits.
- A significant advantage of diamond polishing over grinding is the reduced negative impact on the components in the form of sub-surface damage (SSD)