After the development of 3D printing, the post-processing of the 3D-printed materials has been continuously studied, and with the recent expansion of the application of 3D printing, interest in it is increasing. Among various surface-machining processes, chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) is a technology that can effectively provide a fine surface via chemical reactions and mechanical material removal. In this study, two polishing methods were evaluated for the reduction of surface roughness and glossiness of a stereolithography apparatus (SLA) 3D-printed ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene)-like resin. Experiments were conducted on the application of CMP directly to the 3D-printed ABS-like resin (one-step polishing), and on the application of sanding (#2000) and CMP sequentially (two-step polishing). The one-step polishing experiments showed that it took a considerable period of time to remove waviness on the surface of the as-3D printed specimen using CMP. However, in the case of two-step polishing, surface roughness was reduced, and glossiness was increased faster than in the case of one-step polishing via sanding and CMP. Consequently, the experimental results show that the two-step polishing method reduced roughness more efficiently than the one-step polishing method.

Chemical–mechanical polishing (CMP) is a process that planarizes semiconductor surfaces and is essential for the manufacture of highly integrated devices. In CMP, pad conditioning using a disk with diamond grit is adopted to maintain the surface roughness of the polishing pad and remove polishing debris. However, uneven pad wear by conditioning is unavoidable in CMP. In this study, we propose a contact-area-changeable conditioning system and utilize it to conduct a preliminary study for improving pad lifetime. Using the conventional conditioning method (Case I), the material removal rate (MRR) decreased rapidly after 12 h of conditioning and the within-wafer non-uniformity (WIWNU) increased. However, the results of conditioning experiments show that when using a contact-area-changeable conditioning system, uniform pad wear can be obtained in the wafer–pad contact area and the pad lifetime can be extended to more than 20 h. Finally, the newly proposed conditioning system in this study may improve the CMP pad lifetime.