The removal of tiny particles adhered to surfaces is one of the crucial prerequisite for a further increase in IC fabrication, large area displays and for the process in nanotechnology. Various cleaning techniques (wet chemical cleaning, scrubbing, pressurized jets and ultrasonic processes) currently used to clean critical surfaces are limited to removal of micrometer-sized particles. Therefore the removal of sub-micron sized particles from silicon wafers is of great interest. For this purpose various cleaning methods are currently under investigation. In this paper, we report on experiments on the cleaning effect of 100nm sized fluorescence particles on silicon wafer using the plasma shockwave occurred by femtosecond laser. The plasma shockwave is main effect of femtosecond laser cleaning to remove particles. The removal efficiency was dependent on the gap distance between laser focus and surface but in some case surface was damaged by excessive laser intensity. These experiments demonstrate the feasibility of femtosecond laser cleaning using 100nm size fluorescence particles on wafer.
