Spin coating can also be used to clean substrates, but experience has been that it generally yields relatively poor results compared to sonic bath based cleaning and is slow compared to cleaning a batch of substrates at a time. It also often results in the use of large amounts of solvent in the Spin Coater, which can be a problem if these steps are performed in an environment where solvent removal is required, such as laminar flow.
However, sometimes spin cleaning and washing steps can be very useful, for example HMDS and certain other surface modification treatments can benefit from spin washing. At the same time, spin-coating semi-orthogonal solvents can also be used to remove some additives.
For spin washes, researchers typically use dynamic dispensing of medium volumes of solvent (50 µl for a standard 20 x 15 mm substrate) and possibly several washes. Note that if the solvent is not removed first (typically by wiping excess solvent from the interior of the Spin Coater with a cleanroom tissue), this can generate large amounts of solvent vapor that can affect the drying kinetics of subsequent films.
