Post #1308616

@malwareminigun yeah physics will have something to say about that... since dies are single crystal silicon they naturally want to break along the axes of the crystal structure. Laser dicing and other techniques *can* break at off-nominal axes but you'll definitely see yield loss due to cracks during handling especially if you don't round the corners to reduce stress concentrations (as is done on a round wafer) Silicon has a diamond-cubic crystal structure so if your wafer is oriented to the faces of the cube as is standard for cmos aka orientation, it will want to break along orthogonal axes. If you have the wafer oriented at a diagonal aka , which has better properties for certain types of circuit but is not in common use these days, it'll naturally break along 60 degree lines forming equilateral triangles or hexagons