Sustainable Analysis of Energy Consumption and Surface Quality of Monocrystalline Silicon in Diamond Wire Sawing

Semiconductor industries have strong demands for innovative techniques and optimum parameters in the machining domain to minimize the cost and environmental footprint during the wafer fabrication process. Identifying where energy is consumed in a machine tool is a critical step in reducing the energy and environmental impact of machining. In the semiconductor industry, diamond wire sawing (DWS) is a primary and time-consuming wafer fabrication process. However, the evaluation and assessment of energy consumption and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission in this process have not been thoroughly studied. This paper investigates the optimum process parameters for monocrystalline silicon to minimize energy consumption, CO₂ emission, and surface quality through the DWS process. The experiment has conducted on rectangular monocrystalline silicon with different process parameters. The energy consumption of the DWS tool at various power sources and the surface roughness of the as-sawn wafers are measured, whereas the CO₂ emission of materials and energy consumption of the DWS tool are analyzed. An autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) is employed to predict the energy consumption of the DWS tool. The result indicates that the maximum energy consumption and CO₂ emission have been obtained at the higher wire speed and feed rate settings. Besides, the ARIMA model of total energy consumption prediction accuracy reached 99.1% compared to experimental results and verified the developed model.