Ozone cleaning of carbon-related contaminants on Si wafers and other substrate materials

We have investigated a novel surface cleaning technique of native oxide on Si wafer, in which carbon-related contaminants are removed effectively at room temperature with a pure ozone beam from an ozone jet generator that we developed. Although ozone alone was likely to be little reactive to saturated carbons and byproducts in the reaction of ozone with unsaturated carbons which could be assigned to either carbonyl- or carboxyl-related compounds, a high-dose pure ozone under ultraviolet light irradiation to generate atomic oxygen by the photo-dissociation of ozone removed most of them at room temperature. The effectiveness of the ozone cleaning was also demonstrated for selected oxide surfaces.