This article presents a cost-effective ultraviolet-ozone cleaner (UV/O3 Cleaner) for surface pre-treatment of substrates in the field of semiconductor technology. The cleaner consists of two chambers, the upper one contains the electronics, including the time counter. The lower chamber contains the two UV sterilisation lamps and a UV reflector of anodized aluminium, which confines the area of high Ozone concentration in the area of interest. The device is successfully used for surface cleaning and modification of different materials. To this end, the two important wavelengths 253.7 nm (excitation of organic residues) and 184.9 nm (production of ozone from the atmospheric environment as a strong oxidant) were first detected. The effectiveness of UV/O3 cleaning is demonstrated by improving the properties of indium tin oxide (ITO) for OLED fabrication. The contact angle of water to ITO could be reduced from 90° to 3° and for diiodomethane, it was reduced from 55° to 31° within the 10 min of irradiation. This greatly improved wettability for polar and non-polar liquids can increase the flexibility in further process control. In addition, an improvement in wettability is characterized by measuring the contact angles for titanium dioxide (TiO2) and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). The contact angle of water to TiO2 decreased from 70° to 10°, and that of diiodomethane to TiO2 from 54° to 31°. The wettability of PDMS was also greatly increased. Here, the contact angle of water was reduced from 109° to 24° and the contact angle to diiodomethane from 89° to 49°.
Article Highlights
We report a cost-effective dry-cleaning device for surface cleaning and modification based on ultraviolet-ozone irradiation.
Contact angle measurements show an increase of wettability for different materials due to surface modification.
The UVO3 pre-treatment improves layer formation and optoelectrical properties of OLEDs.
Highlights We used HAXPES to identify chemical interactions at the buried silicon/aluminum-doped zinc oxide thin-film solar cell interface. The results indicate a diffusion of zinc and aluminum into the silicon upon annealing procedures which are part of the solar cell processing. The contamination of the silicon may be detrimental for the solar cell performance.
For properties characterization of nanostructured materials and simultaneously to predict their reliability a tensile testing system consisting of a thermal actuator and a lateral nano-Newton force piezoresistive sensor is presented. The implementation of a piezoresistive load sensor in a MEMS-based tensile testing system can be regarded as an innovative and ultrasensitive method to continuously observe the specimen deformation while simultaneously measuring the applied load electronically with nano-Newton resolution. The primary technique that we have used for the fabrication of these systems is Bonding and Deep Reactive Ion Etching (BDRIE) applied on SOI wafers
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