Physical modeling of rinsing and cleaning of submicron trenches

Cleaning of surfaces and submicron deep trenches is a tremendous challenge in semiconductor manufacturing. In this work, the rinsing of blanket and patterned wafers using pulsating flow are studied using physical numerical modeling. Preliminary results on blanket wafers cleaning process show good agreement with numerical and experimental results of literatures. Preliminary results for blanket and patterned wafers show that oscillating flow rinse is more efficient than steady flow rinse, and the optimum frequency of the oscillating flow is a function of the size of the trench.