| abstract |
A low-temperature (350° C. to 750° C.) in-situ dry cleaning process for removing native oxide (and other contaminants) from a semiconductor wafer surface, that can be used with either batch or single-wafer semiconductor device manufacturing reactors. A wafer is contacted with a dry cleaning mixture of digermane Ge 2 H 6 and hydrogen gas (51). The digermane-to-hydrogen flow ratio is small enough (usually between 1 ppm to 100 ppm) to ensure effective wafer surface cleaning without any germination deposition. Moreover, the dry cleaning mixture can include a halogen-containing gas (such as HCl or HBr) (52, 54) to enhance removal of metallic contaminants, and/or anhydrous HF gas (53, 54) to further enhance the native oxide removal process. The dry cleaning process can be further activated by introducing some or all of the hydrogen and/or an inert additive gas as a remote plasma. The digermane-based cleaning process of this invention can also be further activated by photo enhancement effects. This dry cleaning process is adaptable as a precleaning step for multiprocessing applications that, during transitions between process steps, reduce thermal cycling (FIGS. 3a-c) by reducing wafer temperature only to an idle temperature (350° C.), and by reducing vacuum cycling via maintaining constant flow rates for carrier gases (FIG. 3a), thereby substantially reducing thermal stress and adsorption of residual impurities, while limiting dopant redistribution. |