In this paper, a detailed analysis is presented to characterize the performance of colloidal silica abrasives based slurry with different abrasive sizes on CMP of hexagonal 4H-SiC wafer, and indicates that the abrasive size is an important factor to determine the efficiency of CMP and the final planarization quality of wafer surface. The authors also present a detailed hypothesis to describe the material removal mechanism of 4H-SiC by colloidal silica abrasives during CMP process, and design two groups of experiments to demonstrate the rationality of the hypothesis. Furthermore, the authors put forward some suggestions to optimize the CMP efficiency and planarization quality of 4H-SiC wafer. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.