Research on chemo-mechanical grinding of large size quartz glass substrate

Finishing process of quartz glass substrate is meeting great challenges to fulfill the requirements of photomask for photolithography applications. For the final finishing of the substrate surface, chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) is often utilized. Those free abrasive processes are able to offer a great surface roughness, but sacrifice profile accuracy. On the other hand, the fixed abrasive process or grinding is known as a promising solution to improve accuracy of profile geometry, but always introduces damaged layer. Chemo-mechanical grinding (CMG) is potentially emerging defect-free machining process which combines the advantages of fixed abrasive machining and CMP. In order to simultaneously achieve high surface quality and high profile accuracy, CMG process has been applied into machining of large size quartz glass substrates for photomask use. Reported in this paper are CMG performances in finishing of quartz glass substrates including material removal rate (MRR), surface roughness, flatness and optical characteristics.