Dry cleaning procedure for silicon IC fabrication

A complete, fully integrated dry wafer cleaning procedure based on remote plasma processing is introduced. Included are all the steps needed to prepare a resist coated wafer following a field oxide etch for further processing. Experimental results based on surface analysis and MOS electrical measurements demonstrate its adequate performance in pre-gate oxidation cleaning. The results obtained can be viewed as a promising step toward the development of dry wafer cleaning technology with a possibly wide range of applications in silicon IC fabrication.