A Study of Nanoparticle Removal on Patterned Surfaces

Abstract

In this paper a novel method is presented whereby both the damage and the particle removal efficiency on one patterned substrate can be assessed. The method is based on defect inspection by an automated brightfield inspection tool and its successive defect classification. In order to evaluate the method, a representative and common cleaning technique, aerosol spray cleaning, was used. The performance of this method was compared with particle removal efficiency evaluation on non-patterned substrates. Interestingly, particle removal efficiencies on patterned surfaces were much lower than on blanket silicon wafers.