dicing

Dicing is one of many steps in chip manufacturing. It is the cutting of the chip cores out of the wafer. The cutting out of a single chip core is called singulation.

After the wafers are finished, the chips on the wafer are subjected to an initial test and the defect-free chips are cut out and encapsulated in packages in traditional packaging. Wafer Level Packaging(WLP) is different, where the packaging of the chip cores is done on the wafer, and the dicing is done afterwards.

Cutting the chip cores out of the wafer can be done with a diamond saw or with a laser, where the cutting width of the laser is superior to that of a mechanical saw. To ensure that the wafers are fixed in place during the cutting process, they are glued to a saw band. The cut-out chip cores that remain on the tape are the dice. They are either placed directly on the PCB by die-handling equipment with a bonding device wired to them and encapsulated in a package.

The smallest dice are 0.1 mm in size, while the larger ones are about 40 mm in size. They can be rectangular or square, or cut into any shape, depending on their use.