The present invention has as its object the provision of a desmear treatment device and a desmear treatment method capable of sufficiently removing smear remaining in a to-be-treated object in a short amount of time. The desmear treatment device of the present invention includes: a treatment chamber in which a to-be-treated object is disposed; a light source unit in which an ultraviolet lamp for irradiating the to-be-treated object with ultraviolet rays is housed; a light transmissive window that is disposed between the treatment chamber and the light source unit and that transmits the ultraviolet rays from the ultraviolet lamps; and treatment gas supply means for supplying a treatment gas containing a source of active species to the treatment chamber. The treatment gas supply means includes a treatment gas supply source and a control unit for controlling a supplied amount of the treatment gas from the treatment gas supply source. The control unit has a function of controlling the treatment gas from the treatment gas supply source to be supplied as a purge gas when irradiating the to-be-treated object with ultraviolet rays.

The present invention has as its object the provision of a desmear treatment device and a desmear treatment method capable of reliably performing a desmear treatment with high treatment efficiency. In the desmear treatment method of the present invention, when irradiating a to-be-treated object disposed in a treatment space with vacuum ultraviolet rays via an ultraviolet transmitting window member to remove smear in the to-be-treated object, a treatment gas containing active species to be activated by the irradiation of the vacuum ultraviolet rays and having contained moisture is supplied into the treatment space. The desmear treatment device includes treatment gas supply means having a humidifying mechanism for causing a treatment gas containing active species to be activated by vacuum ultraviolet rays from an ultraviolet light source to contain moisture.

An embodiment is a method and apparatus to treat surface of polymer for printing. Surface of a polymer having a surface energy modified for a time period to control a feature characteristic and/or provide a hysteresis behavior. A material is printed on the surface to form a circuit pattern having at least one of the controlled feature characteristic and the hysteresis behavior.

A method of manufacturing an electrical device, comprising: forming a patterned inorganic liftoff layer to expose a target electrode site on a softening polymer layer, depositing an electrode layer on the inorganic liftoff layer and on the exposed target electrode site, and removing the inorganic liftoff layer by a horizontal liftoff etch to leave the electrode layer on the exposed target electrode site.

The present invention relates to a process of oxidizing copper in a copper etching solution by using oxygen gas and/or air as an oxidizing agent, the process comprising the steps of: a) introducing the oxidizing agent into an acidic reduced copper etching solution comprising Cl.sup. and Cu.sup.+, b) stirring the solution obtained in step a), and thereby allowing the reaction 2Cu.sup.++O.sub.2 (aq)+2H.sup.+.fwdarw.2Cu.sup.2++H.sub.2O to occur, thereby producing an oxidized copper etching solution comprising less Cu.sup.+ than the reduced copper etching solution. An advantage of the present invention is that it provides an improved process at least in terms of the speed of the oxidation and the quality of the etching.