The organic contamination by volatile organics outgassed from the plastic wafer storage is one of the very important concerns in ultra clean processing of silicon surface. In this study, silicon surfaces have been artificially contaminated by above kind of volatile organics and subsequent cleaning has been performed by N2O electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) plasma treatment with different exposure times. A trace amount of contaminants on the silicon surface has been measured by attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR). The results indicate that efficient removal of organic contaminants from the semiconductor surface can be achieved with a short time exposure of N2O ECR plasma. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.