Disco Corporation
More info
- Released
- 1937
- Type
- Precision cutting and grinding
The Japanese firm that saws and grinds nearly every wafer on Earth — and that almost no one outside the industry has heard of.
Disco was founded in 1937 in Kure, Hiroshima, as a maker of grinding wheels; the name comes from the original firm Dai-Ichi Seitosho. Today it is a near-sole market leader in precision cutting: the diamond blades and lasers that separate a finished wafer into individual die.
The same machines also thin chips by backgrinding, a step that turned critical once advanced packaging began stacking die on top of one another. A blade that bites at the wrong angle can crack hundreds of chips in seconds, which is why the dicing step gets an attention that rarely shows up in a datasheet.