Dennis Capitanio, Pall Corporation, Port Washington, NY, USA

The trends toward narrower linewidths in the manufacture of integrated circuits has put an ever increasingburden on contamination control in every aspect of semiconductor fabrication. Point-of-use (POU) filtration of photoresists has been used to control particle contamination on the wafer surface during coating operations. The need for tighter filtration has led to the introduction of 0.05 µm as well as the traditional 0.10 µm membranes to control the contamination during the dispense of photoresists. With the introduction of tighter membranes for use in photoresist filtration, the end-user may have concerns that the photoresist may suffer some deleterious effects by undergoing filtration.