Paper SE+PS-WeA10
Selection of an Atmospheric Plasma Source for 450mm Backside Wafer Cleaning

Wednesday, October 30, 2013, 5:00 pm, Room 203 C

TNO is working on the selection and development of a non-thermal atmospheric plasma source for backside wafer cleaning. This selection started with a theoretical comparison of the potential candidates. Main criteria for the selection are cleaning speed, the amount of contamination that can be removed in a certain time and plasma temperature. Further criteria are the dependency of plasma homogeneity on substrate conductivity, the distance between the plasma source and the substrate as well as scalability of the source up to a 450 mm wide cleaner. Backside wafer cleaning is important for the semiconductor industry to enable the transition from 300 mm wafers to 450 mm wafers. Contamination on the backside of a wafer can lead to printing errors and can negatively influence post lithography processing like metal deposition.

The selection of the plasma source is part of a TNO project that has the objective to build and deliver a complete backside wafer cleaner to the 450 mm pilot line to be installed at IMEC, Belgium. The final selection will be made on the basis of a series of experiments. Candidates already tested are surface- and volume- dielectric barrier discharge (SDBD and VDBD) plasma sources.

In this presentation we will report the outcome of our selection of the plasma source, supported by the validated source inventory and experimental results.

This work is funded by the ENIAC Joint Undertaking and AgentschapNL. It has the goal to enable the European semiconductor industry to make the transition to 450mm wafers