Process aware, defectivity based contamination control recipe development in chip manufacturing

Abstract

The invention relates to a method for cleaning items, especially containers for transporting and / or storing wafers or reticles such as FOUPs or reticle pods, in a fab environment, comprising the steps of identification of a plurality of critical contaminants amongst the total contamination, especially in a closed (mini) environment such as the interior of a container, after identifying the critical contaminants, choosing and / or optimizing a cleaning process with a view to suppressing at least one of the plurality of critical contaminants, especially until a predetermined first threshold level of the at least one of the critical contaminants has been reached, and after supressing the at least one of the plurality of the critical contaminants, reducing the overall contamination, especially comprising AMCs, VoCs etc, especially until a predetermined second threshold level of the overall contamination has been reached.

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