A Study on the removal of Metallic Impurities on Si-wafer using Electrolyzed Water

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As the semiconductor devices are miniaturized, the number of the unit cleaning processes increases. In order to processes by conventional RCA cleaning process, the consumption of volume of liquid chemical and DI water became huge. Therefore, the problem of environmental issues are evolved by the increased consumption of chemicals. To resolve this matter, an advanced cleaning process by Electrolyzed Water was studied in this work. The electrolyzed water was made by an electrolysis equipment which was composed of three chambers of anode, cathode, and middle chambers. In the case of electrolyzed water with electrolytes in the middle chamber, oxidatively acidic water of anode and reductively alkaline water of cathode were obtained. The oxidation/reduction potentials and pH of anode water and cathode water were measured to be +l000mV and 4.8, and -530mV and 6.3, respectively. The Si-wafers contaminated with metallic impurities were cleaning with the electrolyzed water. To analysis the amounts of metallic impurities on Si-water surfaces, ICP-MS(Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass spectrometer) was introduced. From results of ICP-MS measurements, it was concluded that the ability of electrolyzed water was equivalent to that of the conventional RCA cleaning.