Contact and non contact post-CMP cleaning of thermal oxide silicon wafers

Post-CMP cleaning of polished thermal oxide wafers is conducted using megasonic and brush cleaning techniques. The wafers were polished using Rodel silica based slurry. The results achieved by the two different cleaning methods are presented and compared. They show that although the two techniques produce comparable cleaning performance, non-contact cleaning using SCl produces lower defect counts on the cleaned wafers.