About Kerf & Korn

Kerf & Korn is an independent publication about sawing silicon wafers, about sawing slurries made of silicon carbide and glycol, about silicon carbide as a material, and about the recycling of the material streams these processes produce. It appears in German and in English.

What it publishes

• Explanatory articles on processes: multi-wire sawing with loose abrasive and with diamond wire, slurry separation, and recovery of silicon from kerf.
• Materials and standards: how silicon carbide is made and how abrasive grit sizes are defined.
• In the English edition, articles on the European context: siting wafer, module and chip plants, industrial electricity prices, critical raw materials and the recycling of photovoltaic modules.

The English articles are not word-for-word translations of the German ones. Where both editions cover the same topic, the pages are linked to each other, but each is written for its own readers and may cite different sources.

How the articles are checked

• Technical figures and legal references come from primary sources: standards (ISO, FEPA, SEMI), legal texts on EUR-Lex, official statistics (Eurostat), reports of public bodies and agencies (European Commission, European Court of Auditors, IEA, IRENA), peer-reviewed papers, research-institute conference papers and patents. The source is linked in the text.
• Figures from patents or single experiments are labelled as such; they describe the conditions in that document, not the industry in general.
• What cannot be sourced is not written. Where values depend on the plant, supplier or recipe, the text says so rather than quoting a single number. Prices are not quoted from memory: the article on electricity prices explains where current figures are published instead.
• Articles are revised when standards, legislation or the state of the art change; the date of the last change appears at the top of the article.

What Kerf & Korn does not do

Kerf & Korn is not a company in this industry. It offers no slurry reprocessing, no purchase or sale of slurry, abrasives or glycol, no logistics, no consulting, no site selection service and no contact persons for such services. It does not replace suppliers' safety data sheets, legal advice, or a permit or waste-law assessment of a specific case. Company and brand names appear only where a source requires them; trademarks belong to their owners.

About this domain

From roughly 2008 until around 2018 this domain carried the website of a company that reprocessed sawing slurries for wafer manufacturing, in German and English. Later, in 2026, unrelated gambling pages were published on the domain by third parties; those pages have been removed. Kerf & Korn is a new and independent publication. It has no connection with the former company or with the later operators, does not offer their services, and reuses none of their text, images or logos. Former contact, newsletter and poll pages no longer exist; their addresses lead to the home page or to the German version of this page.

Images

The photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and are under free licences; authors and licences are given in the captions and on the image credits page.

Corrections

Standards and regulations change, and technical literature sometimes contradicts itself. If you find an outdated or wrong statement, the publisher can be reached through the details in the legal notice.