Patent ID: 8029624

Claim:
A rinsing method for rinsing a substrate having an exposure pattern thereon after developing the exposure pattern, the rinsing method comprising the following steps: (A) measuring a contact angle formed by a rinse liquid on each of different surface states that respectively appear on substrates processed by development; (B) sorting the surface states into different groups based on different ranges of values of the contact angles measured in step (A); (C) allocating rinsing processes, which cause development defects to fall within a tolerance, to the groups defined in step (B), thereby generating reference data comprising correlations between said different value ranges and the rinsing processes; (D) storing the reference data generated in step (C) in a memory unit in the form of a control table; (E) measuring a contact angle formed by a rinse liquid on a surface of a target substrate processed by development, thereby obtaining a measurement angle value; (F) checking the measurement angle value obtained in step (E) against the reference data in the control table to determine to which contact angle value range the contact angle measured in step (E) corresponds; (G) selecting from the groups, a specific group which the measurement angle value belongs to and regarding one of the rinsing processes allocated to the specific group as an adequate rinsing process; (H) rinsing the target substrate by use of the adequate rinsing process; and (I) repeating steps (E) through (H) for another subsequent target substrate.