Novel Cleaning Method of SiC Wafer with Transition Metal Complex

In this article, we report a new cleaning method for silicon carbide (SiC) wafers. We found that the dipping treatment in hydrogen fluoride (HF) solution damages the SiC in the “RCA cleaning process”, so we have designed a new cleaning method that does not use HF and reduced the cleaning process to three steps. The characteristic factor of this new method is using a transition metal complex. Generally, no metals have been used for wafer cleaning, but we deliberately used metal and found it could clean the wafer surface very well. After cleaning, the atomic force microscope (AFM) and “Candela” images showed that the particles on most parts of the SiC surface had been removed and the contact angle for ultra-pure water became very low.