Three levers for better rinsing quality High-purity cleaning: Why rinsing determines success or rejection

Rinsing determines whether high-purity components achieve the required cleanliness limits or whether recontamination causes rejects. Three factors are crucial: water quality, minimal carryover and circuit hygiene. We explain the background to these levers and show why rinsing is becoming a system-critical process step.

In high-purity component cleaning, cleanliness requirements are more stringent than in any other industry: permissible upper limits for the chemical composition of the component surface in atomic per cent, low outgassing rates and freedom from particles in the submicron range. The reason for these high requirements stems from the extreme vacuum conditions in which the components are used, for example in EUV lithography, space travel or mass spectrometers for analysis.