Monitoring of particle deposition in cleanrooms: State-of-the-art

Cleanrooms are classified by the cleanliness of air and surface. Classification defined by ISO 14644-1 and 14644-9 is given by the number of particle larger than a critical size in a quantity of volume or surface. No reliable data give the correlation between the air and surface particulate contamination. Various environmental parameters and operating factors determine the particle deposition rate in cleanrooms. The particle deposition real-time monitoring is a concern for numerous application fields such as microelectronics, imaging devices, pharmaceutical industries, agribusiness and space where the risk of contamination by sedimentation of particle is critical for sensitive instruments. New developments in the field of particle deposition monitoring devices are necessary to better classify cleanrooms and improve the control of the cleanliness of surfaces.