Coupling of an electrodialyzer with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry for the on-line determination of trace impurities in silicon wafers after surface metal extraction

Understanding the properties that determine the distribution and behavior of trace impurities in Si wafers is critical to defining and controlling the performance, reliability, and yields of integrated microelectronic devices. It remains, however, an intrinsically difficult task to determine trace impurities in Si because of the minute concentrations and extremely high levels of matrix involved. In this study, we used an electrodialyzer for the simultaneous on-line removal of the silicate and acid matrices through the neutralization of the excessive hydrogen ion and selectively separation of acid and silicate ions by the combination of electrode reaction as a source of hydroxide ions with the anion exchange membrane separation. To retain the analyte ions in the sample stream, we found that the presence of moderate amounts of nitric acid and hydrazine were necessary to improve the retention efficiency, not only for Zn2+, Ni2+, Cu2+, and Co2+ ions but also for CrO42− ion. Under the optimized conditions, the interference that resulted from the sample matrix was suppressed significantly to provide satisfactory analytical signals. The precision of this method was ca. 5% when we used an electrodialyzer equipped with an anion exchange membrane to remove the sample matrix prior to performing inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS); the good agreement between the data obtained using our proposed method and those obtained using a batchwise wet chemical technique confirmed its accuracy. Our method permits the determination of Zn, Ni, Cu, Co, and Cr in Si wafers at detection limits within the range from 2.2 × 1015 to 9.0 × 1015 atoms cm−3.