At present, the global semiconductor and high-end optical manufacturing industry has entered an era of rapid iteration and precision breakthroughs. The continuous advancement of advanced process nodes and the ongoing upgrading of high-end equipment are driving core components toward the extreme directions of miniaturization, ultra-high precision, ultra-high integration, and high stability. Whether it is advanced integrated circuit wafers, high-end lithography machine optical components, or large-scale gratings, precision fused silica, mask substrates, and other core optical devices, unprecedented stringent requirements are imposed on surface flatness, smoothness, and defect-free quality. Machining accuracy has already reached the nanometer or even sub-nanometer level.
Against this backdrop, Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP), as the only core processing technology capable of achieving global ultra-precision planarization, permeates the entire manufacturing process of integrated circuits and precision optical devices, making it an irreplaceable key process in advanced manufacturing chains. The performance ceiling of the CMP process critically depends on the comprehensive properties of the polishing materials. High-quality polishing abrasives and systems are the fundamental enablers for achieving ultra-precision machining, low damage, and high efficiency.
Among various polishing abrasive systems, the surface active sites of ceria abrasives can chemically react with silicon-based materials, forming a softer chemical reaction layer that is subsequently removed through mechanical friction. This mechanism yields a smoother surface while maintaining a high removal rate. Research has shown that doping modification of ceria can further tune its polishing activity, better matching the characteristics of the workpiece and enhancing polishing precision, making it highly suitable for the ultra-precision processing demands of semiconductors. Therefore, the development of ceria-based composite polishing material systems has become a mainstream research focus and key industrial direction in the current CMP field.
However, the practical application of domestically produced ceria composite abrasive systems is still constrained by many engineering problems, such as insufficient fine-tuning control, easy agglomeration of nano-abrasives, poor dispersion stability, and unsatisfactory batch-to-batch stability. Moreover, customized formulation design for different workpiece materials (e.g., silicon wafers, lithography components, fused silica, quartz masks, etc.) also presents certain challenges. How to precisely control the morphology and dispersibility of nano-ceria, optimize polishing performance through modification and composite techniques, and build efficient polishing systems suitable for high-end applications has become a core technical difficulty that the entire industry is focusing on and urgently needs to solve.