June 19, 2002 – Santa Clara, CA – Applied Materials Inc. has introduced its new 300mm single-wafer Oasis Clean system.

The Oasis Clean offers technology for the nearly 50 critical cleaning steps needed to fabricate the transistor area of the chip while providing customers with the faster production cycle time and particle removal performance necessary for nanometer chip manufacturing, AMAT said.

“The Oasis Clean opens a rapidly growing market to Applied Materials,” said Chris Gronet, VP and GM of Applied Materials’ transistor and capacitor product business group. “Chipmakers have used essentially the same wet cleaning process and chemistry for over 30 years, since chips had 10 micron geometries. But as features shrink to the nanometer scale and the number of cleaning steps increases, a faster, more efficient clean process is vital to achieving the high yields and productivity required for 300mm device manufacturing.”

Applied Materials said that its new Oasis Clean removes virtually 100% of the particles from both the front and back sides of a wafer in less than 30 seconds. The system’s single-wafer, multi-chamber architecture can cut chipmakers’ cycle time by 35% or more compared to batch technologies.

Each clean module features horizontal spin processing with full-coverage megasonics to achieve efficient particle removal for improved customer yields while ensuring low silicon and oxide loss to enable continued device design shrinks, AMAT said. Single-step chemistry allows a complete clean in each chamber and eliminates wafer-to-wafer cross contamination by providing fresh chemicals to every wafer. The system also enables chipmakers to reduce DI water consumption by an order of magnitude (10x) over batch systems.