Preface to the Focus Issue on Semiconductor Surface Cleaning and Conditioning

Abstract

The wafer cleaning operations employed in semiconductor device manufacturing do not serve the purpose of building device features by adding films, defining geometries, altering conductivity of semiconductors, or forming contacts and interconnects. Yet, in spite of all this, surface cleaning and conditioning steps are the most frequently applied operations in a typical semiconductor device manufacturing sequence and as such play a critical role in determining manufacturing yield. It is therefore not surprising that the technical papers on broadly understood semiconductor surface processing techniques are common in technical literature, with the ECS publications being no exception. The ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology (JSS) Focus Issue on Semiconductor Surface Cleaning and Conditioning is a natural consequence of the Society’s 25 years of involvement with the technical domain of semiconductor surface processing. The series of ECS-sponsored international symposia on semiconductor cleaning technology was initiated in 1989, and was the very first symposium devoted solely to this critically important element of advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Since then, it has been organized biannually during the ECS Fall meetings, with the latest symposium held in San Francisco in October 2013. Overall, over 750 papers delineating the evolution of semiconductor cleaning technology were published in the thirteen proceedings volumes from this symposium series. This is in addition to a number of groundbreaking papers on semiconductor cleaning published in the ECS journals over the years.