"KENMA", the origin of manufacturing, planarization CMP and its future — A breakthrough toward high-efficient machining of hard-to-machine innovative materials

"KENMA", which means lapping and polishing, is the origin of manufacturing in the ancient era; since then, it has always been the innovative abrasion machining technology. As commonly known, Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) developed along with semiconductor devices has been introduced to device production process, which used to be untouchable for wet process, and has become indispensable planarization method to various technologies such as multilayer wiring and MEMS. Since the invention of a transistor, the primary material for semiconductor devices has been silicon; however it is reaching its theoretical limitation especially in power electronics. In 21st century, we expect that wide band-gap materials such as SiC and GaN or ultimately diamond single crystals will take the major role in power electronics. Nevertheless, the growth and machining technology of these materials are still under development. The immaturity of these technologies is currently the bottleneck for high-performance devices and innovative breakthroughs are strongly demanded. This presentation talks about a machining technology in Japan and the history of "The Planarization & CMP Technical Committee, JSPE" which had 20-year anniversary this year. I will also introduce recent technical topics as follows: “Dilatancy-Pad^®” invented and developed in our laboratory to apply dilatancy phenomena to polishing pad, ultra-high speed, high-quality machining technology using “High-Speed & High-Pressure Machine”, “a plasma CMP” as a breakthrough for the future high-efficient machining, which is a fusion technology of plasma chemical vaporization machining (CVM) and CMP.