How Plasma Cleaning Ensures Superior Adhesion Across Industries
Plasma Cleaning
Microscopic contaminations not visible to the naked eye are found on all surfaces. Almost always, these contaminants must be removed as a first step to producing faultless adhesion between surfaces when working in the application of glueing, printing, painting, bonding, or coating.
Plasma Cleaning Functional Principles
Plasma cleaning technology offers solutions for any type of contamination, for any substrate. In the cleaning process, molecular level contamination residues are removed from a surface by a dry method of turning the foreign materials into a gas. This process of changing the state of a solid or smearable liquid into a gas without exposing the part to a liquid is preferred over standard cleaning methods.
With a plasma cleaner there are virtually no limitations for materials that can be treated. Polymers (solid or fibers), metals, rubbers, ceramics and glass are
Exploring Automated Single-Wafer Ashing of Compound Semiconductors
Ashing, in which the light–sensitive coating known as photoresist is removed and cleaned from an etched wafer, is one of the most important and frequently performed steps in chip fabrication. In this step, photoresist organics are “burned off” using a processing tool in which monatomic plasma is created by exposing oxygen or fluorine gas at low pressure to high–power radio waves. Previously, wafer ashing was largely done using batch–processing techniques to achieve the required throughput.
However, unlike silicon semiconductors, in which wafers are mass–produced in a standard 300–mm size, compound semiconductors are made of silicon carbide, gallium nitride, gallium arsenide, and sapphire, which can vary from 100 to 200 mm. When this is the case, significantly better uniformity of photoresist removal is required, which means better temperature and process controls. As a result, most compound semiconductor wafer
The PlasmaPen™ is a patented atmospheric plasma pen cleaner system for various surface preparation requirements such as surface clean and surface activation. The PlasmaPen™ is a self-contained unit that operates at atmospheric pressure. Its patented design keeps high voltages and current safely inside of the pen body, away from the plasma jet and substrate surfaces. Surface cleaning and activation with the PlasmaPen™ ensures a reliable wire and die bonding in semiconductor
