Patent 6869499 was granted and assigned to Tokyo Electron on March, 2005 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
After semiconductor wafers W have been processed with ozone gas and steam fed into a processing vessel 10, air is fed into the processing vessel 10 from an air supply source connected to an ozone gas supply pipe 42 for feeding ozone gas into the processing vessel 10, whereby an atmosphere of the ozone gas in the processing vessel 10 is replaced with an atmosphere of the air.