“What is wet, but dry?” might sound like a riddle, and the answer for plasma process tools are “wet cleans,” an important type of preventative maintenance. The term “wet clean” comes from the early days of the industry when preventative maintenance meant disassembling the reaction chamber, submerging the quartz parts in acids, rinsing, drying and then reassembling the chamber. In today’s high precision maintenance for process tools the only wet chemistry usually used is a lint-free wipe, moistened with deionized-water, but the name persists. So, maintenance is called “wet,” but is actually “dry.” 

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