Thomas H. Baum, Carl E. Larson, et al.
Journal of Organometallic Chemistry
The use of a dedicated chamber to perform pre-epi deposition cleaning allows native oxide removal with a low thermal budget, and significantly improves throughput of low-temperature Si and SiGe applications. Wafers processed in the cleaning chamber show no detectable contaminants, and the cleansed surface is actually significantly smoother because of cleaning down to a sub-angstrom level.