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The article reports on the new Working Group (WG) established by ISO Technical Committee 209 that convened under the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology's (IEST) leadership for the U.S. It states that WG 10: Nanotechnology will begin work in 2009 under a preliminary scope that would specify the minimum requirements for design, monitoring, operations, and testing of nanotechnology facilities. The new standards for the project are proposed to include guidance for applying established physical, biological, and chemical contamination control principles to nanotechnology facilities.

The purpose of this experiment was to assess the importance of electrostatic attraction in contamination control in a semiconductor fab. Wafer handling was studied in a cryogenic cleaning tool in a working 300-millimeter (mm) fab in the United States. The particles per wafer pass (PWP, >200 nanometers [nm]) was reduced from 0.455±0.058 to 0.245±0.046 through the use of air ionization. While the tool is one of the cleanest in the fab, the tool still exhibited a large percentage improvement in contamination level by the addition of air ionization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]