A comparative study of the HF sorption and outgassing ability of different Entegris FOUP platforms and materials

Front Opening Unified Pod (FOUP) polymers are able to strongly attract airborne molecular contaminants (AMC) coming from the connection to equipment or from the release of just processed wafers but will also later outgas these contaminants. In consequence this subsequent outgassing of species trapped in plastic containers constitutes an important issue to wafer environmental contamination control. In this work, a comparative study of different Entegris FOUP platforms and materials was carried out in order to quantify their capacity to be contaminated by HF through intentional contamination. The subsequent release of this molecule was quantified in terms of outgassing, leaching and transfer over AlCu-wafers. Results obtained allowed us to establish the potential risk in terms of defectivity probability on wafers and to classify the potential cross contamination from FOUP to wafer in three groups: low, medium and high.

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