and the chuck electrode and the wafer are both connected to ground so as to remove the respective charges which had accumulated on the chuck electrode and the wafer during the previous application of the chucking voltage to the chuck electrode the wafer conventionally is grounded by leaving the rf power supply on at a reduced power level to maintain a plasma which provides an electrically conductive path from the wafer to the grounded walls of the chamber however as discussed above after a conventional dechucking method is used a residual charge still remains on the wafer and chuck due to charge migration and or field emission charging as such the prior art dechucking methods may require undue physical force to dislodge the wafer from the chuck the inventive method of dechucking the wafer from the electrostatic chuck is depicted as a flow chart in fig2 this method is generally implemented as a software routine executed upon the computer control system dechucking method 200 starts at step 202 and continues with step 204 at step 204 a lifting force is applied to the wafer this lifting force is relatively small in magnitude and does not dislodge the wafer from the.