Diamond‐Impregnated Wire Saws and the Sawing Process

This chapter presents various aspects of diamond-impregnated wire saws, including the design and manufacturing of diamond wires, the slicing mechanism, comparison between slurry wiresaws and diamond wire saws, and slicing performance versus process parameters. In order to understand the formation of cracks during diamond wire sawing, Wu and Melkote applied an extended finite element method based model in their study and compared it with experimental results where a single diamond was used to scribe silicon. Their study results showed that increasing the tip radius and/or the included angle increased the critical depth of cut by delaying crack initiation in silicon. The chapter presents various properties of wafers sliced by diamond wire saws, and provides comparison with wafers sliced by slurry wiresaws. The properties include wafer surface, fracture strength, residual stress, PV wafer efficiency, and cost of wafering.