Acoustic emission monitoring during laser shock cleaning of silicon wafers

A laser shock cleaning is a new dry cleaning methodology for the effective removal of submicron sized particles from solid surfaces. This technique uses a plasma shock wave produced by laser-induced air breakdown, which has applied to remove nano-scale silica particles from silicon wafer surfaces in this work. In order to characterize the laser shock cleaning process, acoustic waves generated during the shock process are measured in real time by a wide-band microphone and analyzed in the change of process parameters such as laser power density and gas species. It was found that the acoustic intensity is closely correlated with the shock wave intensity. From acoustic analysis, it is seen that acoustic intensity became stronger as incident laser power density increased. In addition, Ar gas has been found to be more effective to enhance the acoustic intensity, which allows higher cleaning performance compared with air or N₂ gas.