Wafer quality specification for future sub-half-micron ULSI devices

Effect of Surface Treatments on the Electrical Properties of Fluorinated Silicon Oxides

“…Ra for CN-4B is 0.1 nm and that for CN-5B is 0.761 nm. In the literature, 14,36,37 it has been confirmed that the increase of surface microroughness would severely degrade the breakdown characteristics (E BD and Q BD ) of a thin oxide with a thickness of 8 nm and below. This is due to effective oxide thickness reduction, which means that some areas of extremely thin oxides exist and the current can flow through these tunneling paths easily.…”

“…The surface microroughnesses in this study are found to be comparable to other etching processes with microroughness of 0.1-1 nm. [14][15][16][17][18] Conclusions Six different etching solutions, including dilute HF, methanol/HF, HNO 3 /HF/H 2 O, and HNO 3 /HF/H 2 O 2 , were used as surface treatment processes right after the standard RCA cleaning. These surface etching steps lead to a large variation of the degree of hy- drogen passivation, which greatly affects the LPD-SiOF growing mechanism for the surface bonding process, and hence a prominent GDT is observed (<12 min).…”

“…As an alternative, a convenient method of cleaning technology based on H 2 O 2 chemistry in semiconductor manufacturing process has been demonstrated to be the most efficient wet cleaning method before the growth of thermal oxide. Many novel wet cleaning methods have been proposed in the literature, such as HF/deionized (DI) water/O 3 /megasonics cleaning, 12 ozonized water/diluted HF, 13 modified RCA cleaning, 14 HNO 3 -HF system, 15,16 HF-last cleaning process, 17 and HF-H 2 O 2 system, 18 which were utilized in addition to the standard RCA cleaning process. It was shown that low surface microroughness and a high degree of surface passivation were achieved and consequently the oxide quality of thermally oxidized silicon was remarkably improved.…”

“…The smaller content (i.e., 0.05) of NH 4 OH other than that (i.e., 10) in conventional RCA cleaning has been demonstrated to greatly reduce the surface microroughness. 14 After dipping APM-treated substrates into ultraclean DI water for 5 min, they were subjected to HPM solution (HCl/H 2 O 2 /H 2 O) with a volume ratio of 10:10:60 at 80ЊC for 15 min to remove alkaline ions and metallic ions. These substrates with chemically formed native oxides S0013-4651(99)10-061-2 CCC: $7.00 © The Electrochemical Society, Inc. by APM and HPM were dipped into different etching solutions (see Table I) to remove native oxides completely and achieve a hydrogenpassivated surface.…”

Residual‐Surfactant‐Free Photoresist Development Process

“…Also, DHF-H202-H20 cleaning can suppress the surface microroughness on Cz n-type Si wafer, which can not be achieved in the conventional DHF cleaning. It also effectively removes heavy metals, such as copper (Cu) (8)(9)(10). Surfactants have been added to many chemicals in an attempt to improve the wettability and the performance of the etching time dependence (11,12).…”