Silicon Wafer Surface Analysis - Inorganic
 The current industry trend is toward the manufacture of semiconductor devices which exhibit faster operational speeds, smaller feature sizes, larger scales of integration, and lower manufacturing costs from yield enhancements and defect reduction. As device features continue to shrink to satisfy these goals, the need to characterize trace metal contamination on silicon wafer surfaces becomes more important. Contamination currently accounts for over 50% of the yield losses in semiconductor IC device manufacturing.
Agilent Technologies: A Long History in Wafer Surface Analysis
Many leading semiconductor manufacturers determine the purity of both the native and thermal oxide layer on silicon wafers using surface contamination concentration techniques, such as Surface Metal Extraction Inductively Coupled Mass Spectrometry (SME-ICP-MS). Agilent’s expertise in this challenging application has led to the wide acceptance of its ICP-MS systems for this type of analysis. This analysis can provide valuable information on the type, the source, and the levels of metallic contamination at almost every processing step in semiconductor manufacturing. Advantages of SME-ICP-MS include accurate analysis of up to 40 elements in a single droplet, excellent detection limits (part per trillion and sub part per trillion) and a 20-minute turn-around time for wafer VPD preparation and analysis. These features of the SME-ICP-MS technique make it uniquely suited to perform real time wafer production monitoring.
Literature
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- Characterization of Trace Impurities in Silicon Wafers by High Sensitivity Reaction Cell ICP-MS
Junichi Takahashi and Kouichi Yuono
Agilent Technologies Inc., Japan
Agilent 7500 Series ICP-MS application note 5988-9529EN
May, 2003
- Characterization of Surface Metal Contamination on Silicon Wafers using Surface Metal Extraction Inductively Coupled Mass Spectrometry (SME-ICP-MS)
Mike Radle and Tom Gluodenis
Agilent Technologies Inc., USA
Agilent 7500 Series ICP-MS application note 5988-4602EN
September, 2001
- Using ICP-MS for in-line monitoring of metallics in silicon wafer cleaning baths
Larry W. Shive, Kenneth Ruth, and Philip Schmidt
MEMC Electronic Materials
Micro Magazine
- Silicon Wafer Surface Metals Characterization by VPD-ICP-MS
Mike Radle and Tom Gluodenis
Agilent Technologies Inc., USA
Agilent 4500 Series ICP-MS application note 5968-3236EN
April, 2000
- Silicon Wafer Thermal Oxide Characterization by Surface Metals Extraction ICP-MS
Huiling Lian, Beau Nicoley, and Arnold J. Howard
Intel Corporation, New Mexico, USA
Mike Radle
Agilent Technologies Inc., USA
Agilent ICP-MS Journal, Issue 5, November, 1999
- Evaluating the performance of polysulfone membrane filters in SC-1 chemistries
Darryl Weddington, Todd Ridley, and Vincent Ladigo
Motorola APRDL
James Campbell and Mark Gogol
Memtec Electronics
Micro Magazine, April, 1998
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