Novel single-wafer, single-chamber combined dry and wet system for stripping and in-situ cleaning of high-dose ion-implanted photoresists

A demand for moving from batch immersion tools to single-wafer spin tools has been increasing in the advanced semiconductor manufacturing. But high-dose ion-implanted resist removal using a conventional single-wafer spin tool is very difficult. This paper reports an advanced single-wafer spin-cleaning system with combination of dry ashing and moderate-temperature wet cleaning by implementing an atmospheric pressure (AP) plasma unit into a conventional single-wafer spin cleaning tool. This compact system can completely remove high-dose ion-implanted resists by an AP plasma ash process followed by an in-situ wet clean process in the same single-chamber within 2min.