Evaluation of cleaning efficiency with a radioactive tracer and development of a microwave digestion method for semiconductor processes Original Research Article

A radioactive tracer technique was applied to investigate the effectiveness of various wet cleaning recipes in removing metallic impurities such as sodium, iron and cesium. The effects of solution temperatures and substrate types were studied. The mechanisms of the electrochemical segregation of metallic impurities between the substrate and cleaning solution were examined. The enthalpy of oxide formation and the effect of adsorption were the two reasons for the presence of surface metal impurities in the cleaning solutions. Our results indicated that SC2 and DHF can effectively remove the metallic impurities at 47 and 82°C, while SPM and BOE are only effective at 82°C. The gravimetric method was successfully implemented to evaluate the open-focused microwave digestion efficiency for anti-reflective coating and photoresist (PR) samples. By following the established microwave digestion method and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometric determination, the detection limits (DLs) obtained for multi-elements were in the ng ml−1 and sub-ng ml−1 levels. Except for calcium, the spike recoveries of the metals were in the range 82–121% for the lithographic samples. The analytical results were found to be in reasonably good agreement with literature values, and the lithographic sample throughput can achieve up to 3.5 samples per hour for the analysis of 13 elements.