Cleaning and Surface Preparation

About 30% of IC manufacturing processes are cleaning related. The device performance, reliability and product yield of silicon circuits are adversely affected by the presence of contaminants and particulate impurities on the wafer surface. Processes for cleaning silicon wafers include:

• pre-thermal treatments such as oxidation,
• and before and after film deposition

These processes are critically important because of the extreme sensitivity of the semiconductor surface and the nanometer sizes of the device features.

Our applications engineering can help you achieve "ultra clean" substrates.

We have over 25 years’ experience in these processes:

• RCA clean
• Standard clean 1 (SC 1)
• Standard clean 2 (SC 2)
• HF last clean
• Surface tension gradient drying (Marangoni drying)
• Dilute processing
• Particle removal including megasonic processing
• and more.

Read our White Paper on Solvent and Semi-Aqueous Chemistry Applications where inorganic solutions cannot be used.