Acoustic cavitation behavior in isopropyl alcohol added cleaning solution

Abstract

As the semiconductor manufacturing technology for ultra-high integration devices continue to shrink beyond 32 nm, stringent measures have to be taken to get damage free patterns during the cleaning process. The patterns are no longer cleaned with the megasonic (MS) irradiation in the advanced device node because of severe pattern damages caused by cleaning. Recently, several investigations are carried out to control the cavitation effects of megasonic to reduce the pattern damages. The mechanism of damage caused by an unstable acoustic bubble motion was mainly attributed to the high sound pressure associated with violent bubble collapse [1]. In order to characterize the dominant factors affecting the cavitation, MS cleaning was conducted with various dissolved gas concentrations in water. It was reported that the cavitation phenomena relating to particle removal efficiency (PRE) and pattern damage were considerably changed with the addition of a specific gas [2]. This changing behavior may be due to the difference in the physical properties of dissolved gases associated with acoustic bubble growth rate as a function of their concentration. In particular, cavitation effects induced during MS cleaning was controlled by adjusting the acoustic bubble growth rate. Also the change of bubble growth rate is well explained by both rectified diffusion for single bubble and bubble coalescence for multi-bubble, respectively. Similarly, it is well-known that surface active solute (SAS) in the ultrasound field plays an important role in controlling the cavitation effects. A detailed explanation of the acoustic bubble growth rate, cavitation threshold and their relationship with various types of SAS and concentration of biomedical and chemical reactions perspective have been reported elsewhere [3,4]. Their studies demonstrated that the change of cavitation effects depends not only on the chain length of alcohol in the solution but also on the physical properties such as surface tension and viscosity of SAS solutions.