• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.61 no.1
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• pp.94-98
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• 2012

The behavior of ozone micro bubble cleaning system was investigated to evaluate the solution as a new method of solar cell wafer cleaning in comparison with former conventional RCA cleaning. We have developed the ozone dissolution system in the ozonated water for more efficient cleaning conditions. The optimized cleaning conditions for solar cell wafer process were 10 ppm of ozone concentration and 12 minutes in cleaning periods, respectively. We have confirmed the cleaning reliability and cell efficiencies after ozone micro bubble cleaning. Using this new cleaning technology, it was possible to obtain higher efficiency, higher productivity, and fast tact time for applying cleaning in the fields on bare ingot wafer, LED wafers as well as the solar cell wafer.

• Journal of ILASS-Korea
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.185-190
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• 2007

There is a growing interest to develop a new cleaning technology to overcome the disadvantages of wet cleaning technologies such as environmental pollution and the cleaning difficulty of contaminants on integrated circuits. Laser cleaning is a potential technology to remove various pollutants on a wafer surface. However, there is no fundamental data about cleaning efficiencies and cleaning mechanisms of contaminants on a wafer surface using a laser cleaning technology. Therefore, the cleaning characteristics of a wafer surface using an excimer laser were investigated in this study. Fingerprint consisting of inorganic and organic materials was chosen as a representative of pollutants and the effectiveness of a laser irradiation on a wafer cleaning has been investigated qualitatively and quantitatively. The results have shown that cleaning degree is proportional to the laser irradiation time and repetition rate, and quantitative analysis conducted by an image processing method also have shown the same trend. Furthermore, the cleaning efficiency of a wafer contaminated by fingerprint strongly depended on a photothermal cleaning mechanism and the species were removed in order of hydrophilic and hydrophobic contaminants by laser irradiation.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2000.05a
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• pp.743-746
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• 2000

The removal of contaminants of silicon wafers has been investigated by various methods. Laser cleaning is the new dry cleaning technique to replace wafer wet cleaning in the near future. A dry laser cleaning uses inert gas jet to remove contaminant particles lifted off by the action of a KrF excimer laser. A laser cleaning model is developed to simulate the cleaning process and analyze the influence of contaminant particles and experimental parameters on laser cleaning efficiency. The model demonstrates that various types of submicrometer-sized particles from the front sides of silicon wafer can be efficiently removed by laser cleaning. The laser cleaning is explained by a particle adhesion model. including van der Waals forces and hydrogen bonding, and a particle removal model involving rapid thermal expansion of the substrate due to the thermoelastic effect. In addition, the experiment of wafer laser cleaning using KrF excimer laser was conducted to remove various contaminant particles.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.114-118
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• 2009

PVA (polyvinyl alcohol) brush cleaning method is a typical cleaning method for semiconductor cleaning process especially post-CMP cleaning. PVA brush contacts with the wafer surface and abrasive particle, generating the contact rotational torque of the brush, which is the removal mechanism. The brush rotational torque can overcome theoretically the adhesion force generated between the abrasive particle and wafer by zeta potential. However, after CMP (chemical mechanical polishing) process, many particles remained on the wafer because the brush was contaminated in previous post-CMP cleaning step. The abrasive particle on the brush redeposits to the wafer. The level of the brush contamination increased according to the cleaning run time. After cleaning the brush, the level of wafer contamination dramatically decreased. Therefore, the brush cleanliness effect on the cleaning performance and it is important for the brush to be maintained clearly.

• Clean Technology
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.43-50
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• 2012

Cleaning procedure of solar silicon wafer, following ingot sawing process in solar cell production is studied. Types of solar silicon wafer can be divided into monocrystalline or multicrystalline, and slurry sawn wafer or diamond sawn wafer according to the ingot growing methods and the sawing methods, respectively. Wafer surface and contaminants can vary with these methods. The characterisitics of contaminants and wafer surface are investigated for each cleaning substrate, and appropriate cleaning agents are developed. Physical properties and cleaning ability of the cleaning agents are evaluated in order to verify the application in the industry. The wafers cleaned with the cleaning agents do not show any residual contaminants when analyzed by XPS and regular patterns are formed after texturization. Furthermore, the cleaning agents are applied in the production industry, which shows superior cleaning results compared to the existing cleaning agents.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.33 no.10
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• pp.1023-1028
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• 2009

Cleaning is required following CMP (chemical mechanical planarization) to remove particles. The minimization of particle residue is required with each successive technology generation, and the cleaning of wafers becomes more complicated. In copper damascene process for interconnection structure, it utilizes 2-step CMP consists of Cu and barrier CMP. Such a 2-steps CMP process leaves a lot of abrasive particles on the wafer surface, cleaning is required to remove abrasive particles. In this study, the chemical mechanical cleaning(CMC) is performed various conditions as a cleaning process. The CMC process combined mechanical cleaning by friction between a wafer and a pad and chemical cleaning by CMC solution consists of tetramethyl ammonium hydroxide (TMAH) / benzotriazole (BTA). This paper studies the removal of abrasive on the Cu wafer and the cleaning efficiency of CMC process.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.1-6
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• 2003

In the rapid changes of the semiconductor manufacturing technologies for early 21st century, it may be safely said that a kernel of terms is the size increase of Si wafer and the size decrease of semiconductor devices. As the size of Si wafers increases and semiconductor device is miniaturized, the units of cleaning processes increase. A present cleaning technology is based upon RCA cleaning which consumes vast chemicals and ultra pure water (UPW) and is the high temperature process. Therefore, this technology gives rise to environmental issue. To resolve this matter, candidates of advanced cleaning processes have been studied. One of them is to apply the electrolyzed water. In this work, electrolyzed water cleaning was compared with various chemical cleaning, using Si wafer surfaces by changing cleaning temperature and cleaning time, and especially, concentrating upon the contact angle. It was observed that contact angle on surface treated with Electrolyzed water cleaning was $4.4^{\circ}$ without RCA cleaning. Amine series additive of high pKa (negative logarithm of the acidity constant) was used to observe the property changes of cathode water.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2004.07c
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• pp.1820-1822
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• 2004

In this study, major research fields are classified as ozone generation system for dry cleaning wafer of etched silicon wafer, dry cleaning process of etched silicon wafer which includes SEM analysis and ESCA analysis. The following results are deduced from each experiment and analysis. The magnitudes of carbon and silicon were similar to the survey spectrum of silicon wafer which does not cleaning, but magnitude of oxygen was much bigger Because UV light activates oxygen molecules in the oxide film on the silicon wafer.

• Laser Solutions
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.29-35
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• 2003

In semiconductor processing, there are two types of particle contaminated onto the wafer, i.e. dry and wet state particles. In order to evaluate the cleaning performance of laser shock wave cleaning method, the removal of 1 m sized alumina particle at different particle conditions from silicon wafer has been carried out by laser-induced shock waves. It was found that the removal efficiency by laser shock cleaning was strongly dependent on the particle condition, i.e. the removal efficiency of dry alumina particle from silicon wafer was around 97％ while the efficiencies of wet alumina particle in DI water and IPA are 35％ and 55％ respectively. From the analysis of adhesion forces between the particle and the silicon substrate, the adhesion force of the wet particle where capillary force is dominant is much larger than that of the dry particle where Van der Waals force is dominant. As a result, it is seen that the particle in wet condition is much more difficult to remove from silicon wafer than the particle in dry condition by using physical cleaning method such as laser shock cleaning.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.7-11
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• 2012

Among various wet cleaning methods, megasonic and jet spray gained their popularity in single wafer cleaning process for the efficient removal of particulate contaminants from the wafer surface. In the present study, we evaluated these two cleaning methods for particle removal efficiency (PRE) and pattern damage on the aluminum layered wafer surface. Also the effect of $CO_2$ dissolved water in jet spray cleaning is assessed by measuring PRE. It is observed that the jet spray cleaning process is more effective in terms of PRE and pattern damage compared to megasonic cleaning and the mixing of $CO_2$ in the water during jet sprays further increases the PRE. We believe that the outcome of the present study is useful for the semiconductor cleaning process engineers and researchers.