Characterization of Organic Contamination in Semiconductor Manufacturing Processes

The impact of organic contamination on wafer surfaces on the functionality of nanostructures and advanced microelectronics becomes crucial as the continuously shrinking feature sizes become similar to the dimensions of molecules and clusters of molecules. Especially, manufacturing of highly integrated circuits requires clean surfaces as processes might cause defects involving for example carbon and sulfur. The approach to study organic contamination on wafer samples using different analytical tools enables the detection of the whole range of organic compounds including non‐volatile and volatile ones. For the studies the methods used were synchrotron radiation based Near Edge X‐ray Absorption Fine Structure (NEXAFS) in the soft X‐Ray range at the absorption edges of light elements (e.g. C, N, O, F) combined with reference‐free Total‐reflection X‐Ray Fluorescence (TXRF) analysis, Thermal Desorption Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (TD‐GCMS), and Time of Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (TOF‐SIMS)....