Wafer dicing

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Wafer dicing is the process by which individual silicon chips or integrated circuits on a silicon wafer are separated following the processing of the wafer. The dicing process can be accomplished by scribing and breaking, by mechanical sawing (normally with a machine called a Dicing Saw) or by laser cutting. Following the dicing process the individual silicon chips are encapsulated into I.C. Packages which are then suitable for use in building electronic devices such as computers, etc.

During dicing, silicon wafers are typically mounted on dicing tape which has a sticky backing that holds the wafer on a thin sheet metal frame. Once a wafer has been diced, the remaining components that are left on the dicing tape are referred to as die, dice or dies; these are the small integrated circuits that will be integrated into a lead-frame package or placed directly on a PC board substrate as a "bare die". The area that has been cut away are called die streets which are typically about 75 micrometres (0.003 inch) wide. Once a wafer has been diced, the die will stay on the dicing tape until they are extracted by die handling equipment, like a die bonder or die sorter, further in the electronics assembly process.

The size of the die left on the tape may range from 35 mm (very large) to 0.5 mm square (very small). The die created may be any shape generated by straight lines, but they are typically rectangular or square shaped.