ABSTRACT
Contamination within microelectronics manufacturing is ubiquitous. Sources of these contaminants range from the product wafers themselves to trace levels of pollutants in the wafer environment.
The multiplicity of sources and types of contaminants in manufacturing compounds the difficulty with which the discipline of CFM must be approached. At one extreme is the idealist who assumes that every contaminant will cause a defect and thus needs to be eliminated (at least to the lower detection limit of the most sophisticated analytical apparatus). At the other extreme are those who assume no corrective action is warranted until a direct correlation between the contaminant of concern and device yield, reliability, or performance has been established.
