Surface contaminant detection in semiconductors using noncontacting techniques

It is well known that, as device geometries continue to shrink, contaminants such as micro particles as well as metallic and organic contaminants have an ever-increasing impact on device yields. Therefore their detection and identification are of great importance for the microelectronics industry. In this work, the possibility to detect surface contamination on silicon wafers with fast, simple, nondestructive and noncontacting methods is presented, and the capability of using scanning Kelvin probe technique to map surface contaminants on Si wafers is shown. The method proved to be useful for the analyses of surface contaminants because the results obtained were comparable with the ones obtained by well-established spectroscopic methods like space-resolved Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy.