Papers by Author: Jan Van Steenbergen

Abstract: The Si transistor has dominated the semiconductor industry for decades. However, to fulfill the demands of Moore’s law, the Si transistor has been pushed to its physical limits. Introducing new materials with higher intrinsic carrier mobility is one way to solve this problem. Ge, GaAs and InGaAs are known for their high mobilities and are therefore suitable candidates for replacing Si as a channel material. However, introduction of new materials raises new issues. For Si processing, several steps such as cleaning, etching and stripping are based on wet treatments. The knowledge of etch rates of the semiconductor material is of great importance. In this paper, etch rates of Ge, GaAs and InGaAs in several chemical solutions are studied. A comparison of the etch rates is made between the materials.

Abstract: In this paper, a single wafer linear IPA vapour based vertical drying technique is presented. Using salt residue tests the performance of this technique is evaluated and compared to spin drying. The equivalent film thickness of evaporating liquid is below 0.05µm for blanket wafers, which is two orders of magnitude less than with spin drying. It is also shown that the presence of surface topography (200nm high TEOS features on Si covered with a chemical oxide) does not significantly influence the drying performance. A study of the process window shows that for the setup evaluated in this work best performance is achieved when the IPA/N2 flow rate is above 20 liters per minute and the drying speed is below 8 mm/s. With a manual prototype already very good particle performance is demonstrated.