Single Particle Inductivley Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry Metrology for Advanced Semiconductor Process Development

This work describes advanced metrology based on Single Particle Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (spICP-MS) for evaluating ultra-pure chemicals used in electronics applications such as Chemical Mechanical Planarization (CMP), cleaning fluids, photoresist, anti-reflecting coatings etc. spICP-MS was used to measure concentrations and sizes of nanoparticles both upstream and downstream of sub 100 nm rated membranes. One membrane showed over 1000-fold reduction of gold particles sized between 14 and 80 nm. spICP-MS was also used to study ceria nanoparticles before and after CMP of silicon dioxide. Changes in the ceria particle size distributions after CMP showed a relative increase in the concentration of smaller particles. These results demonstrate the application of spICP-MS for the characterization of particles in fluids used in the advanced semiconductor wafer processing.