Comparison of the efficiencies of dry and steam laser cleaning of silicon surfaces

As the structures on microelectronic chips are getting smaller and smaller, reaching the region of a hundred nanometers, the removal of submicroscopic particle contaminants on wafer surfaces becomes of increasing importance. Due to the strong influence of adhesion forces on small particles the conventional cleaning methods such as are inefficient. Recently it has been demonstrated that particles down to diameters of 200nm can efficiently be removed by laser cleaning [1].