Abstract: With magnetic heads operating closer to hard disks, the hard disks are forced to be ultra-smooth. At present, chem- ical-mechanical polishing (CMP) has become a widely accep- ted global planarization technology. CMP(Chemical-mechan- ical polishing) of computer rigid disk substrate in the slurry containing nano-scale SiO2 particle is studied. Results indicated that the average roughness (Ra) and the average waviness (Wa) of the polished surfaces as well as material removal amount were much dependent on the particle size and the contents of the particle and oxidant. Based on Auger electron spectrogram (AES) examinations of the chemical changes in the polished surfaces with the prepared slurry, the CMP mechanism is deduced preliminarily.

Key words: Chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP), CMP mechanism, Rigid disk substrate, Sub-nanometer roughness