Sapphire is one of the most widely used electronic substrate materials in the industry. The manufacturing process of sapphire and such hard and brittle materials is extremely time and energy consuming because of their superior material properties in physical and chemical behaviors. In this study, the ultraviolet-curable resin is introduced into the fabrication of the diamond abrasive lapping plate as a bonding agent. A practical manufacturing process is established in the laboratory to develop an ultraviolet-curable resin bond fixed abrasive lapping plate for the precision machining of sapphire substrates, the machining performance of which is examined through a series of comparative experiments among the conventional fixed-abrasive lapping, the slurry-based lapping and this originally developed plate involved lapping. The surface topography and surface roughness of the machined sapphire workpieces are measured to evaluate the surface quality, and the weight loss of the workpieces in each machining process is recorded to estimate the respective machining efficiency. The promising results achieved from the ultraviolet-curable resin plate lapping process, in terms of a relatively higher material removal rate and better surface quality, indicate that the occurrence of a corporate action integrating both the advantages of the fixed abrasive grains and loose abrasive grains. A summarized hypothesis is drawn to describe the dynamically balanced state of the hybrid precision abrasive machining process, in which the 2-body abrasion and 3-body abrasion material removal mechanism participate simultaneously and interconvert to each other continuously. INDEX TERMS Material processing, sapphire substrate, tool manufacturing. I. INTRODUCTION A. MATERIAL AND MACHINING PROCESS Sapphire is the single crystal form of the compound Al 2 O 3 (α-alumina), and it is the second hardest natural material after diamond. As one of the most recognized highquality opto-mechatronic materials in the industry, it has been used broadly in various fields covering consumer electronics and military equipment. For instance, because of the superior material properties in physical strength, hardness, and The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Bora Onat. high-temperature resistance, sapphire possesses the capability to endure the severe conditions of GaN film deposition, and which make sapphire became the predominate substrate material for light emitting diode (LED) applications [1]-[3]. Moreover, sapphire is also a wide gap (up to 0.9 eV) insulator presenting multiple favorable properties including the refractory behavior and transparency over a wide wavelength range, which enables sapphire to be employed as the laser diodes, optical materials or even insulator in a nuclear reactor [4], [5]. The machining process of sapphire substrate usually starts from the sawing of a sapphire cylinder bar of 50mm to 150mm in diameter, and following a sequence of precision