Metallic Contamination Removal and Addition in Modified SC-1 Solutions

摘要

The RCA clean is widely used in the semiconductor industry during various wet-chemical cleaning processes. The RCA clean consists of a particle removal step, the Standard Clean 1 or SC-1 step and a metallic impurity removal step, the Standard Clean 2 or SC-2 Step. In this work we have investigated the addition of chelating agents in SC-1 solutions to prevent metallic deposition and remove metallic impurities during the SC-1 step. This opens the door to a very fast single step RCA replacement clean. We have used this single step RCA replacement clean for single wafer cleaning and compared immersion and spin cleaning. The combination of the single step RCA replacement chemistry and single wafer processing technology can dramatically reduce the cycle time of cleaning.