Effect of FA/O Chelating Agent on Copper Ion Removing on Silicon Surface

Along with the feature size reducing and the increase of integration level rapidly in ULSI, the request for metal impurities contamination on silicon substrate surface appears specially rigorous. In this paper the chelating agent was added in cleaning solution in order to removing copper ion. FA/O, a new kind of chelating agent was studied in RCA cleaning solutions, which has 13 chelating rings and is free of sodium, stable and easily soluble. The XPS and GFAAS measured results indicate that FA/O is more efficient than NH4OH as a ligand. Cu contaminations on silicon wafer can be removed remarkably when adding a little FA/O to the cleaning solution or polishing slurry. When the chelating agent concentration of cleaning solution is 0.1% the removal rate of Cu atom reaches 83 percent. The FA/O chelating agent substituting NH4OH in SC-1 may simplify cleaning steps, and one cleaning step can remove Cu pollution on silicon wafer surface and meet the requirements of microelectronics technology.