Implanted Photoresist Remover for Advanced Nodes Including SiGe, Ge and High K-Metals

Cleaning photoresist from semiconductor wafers during the transistor formation in the front end of the line (FEOL) becomes more challenging with ever smaller nodes. First of all the resists do become more difficult to clean with decreasing node size, because implantation energy increase and the resist becomes more complex (to comply with the reduced wave length of the laser light for the lithography) at future node sizes. This results in more cross linked / polymerized photoresist, which is harder to (wet) strip. Additionally, the requirements on material compatibility of the cleaning solution increase, as more elements are used to build the transistor less than a monolayer of these materials can be removed during a single cleaning step.