resistive heater 121 and or biasing electrodes with or without electrodes for the electrostatic chuck an anode electrode 111 is disposed above the wafer 102 and the chuck 104 the cathode electrode 120 is disposed immediately below the chuck 104 and supports the chuck 104 in the chamber 100 alternatively the cathode electrode may be formed by additionally or alternatively biasing the walls of the chamber 100 relative to the anode electrode 111 a cathode power supply 122 provides voltage to the cathode electrode 120 during plasma cleaning of the wafer a gas such as argon helium hydrogen or a combination thereof is supplied to the chamber from a gas source 155 once the chamber has an appropriate gas pressure energy from a dc voltage supplied to the chamber by the cathode power supply 122 ignites and sustains the plasma 110 the active gas atoms bombard the wafer 102 and sputter clean its surface 103 alternatively an rf voltage may be used to produce the plasma 110 a system controller 160 includes hardware that provides the necessary signals to initiate regulate and terminate the processes occurring in the preclean chamber 100 the system controller 160 includes a programmable central processing unit cpu 162 that is operable with a memory 164 e g ram rom hard disk and or removable storage and well known support circuits 166 such as power supplies clocks cache and the like by executing software stored in the memory 164 the system controller 160 produces control outputs 159 165 167 168 and 169 that respectively provide signals for controlling the heater power supply 161 the gas source 155 the cathode power supply 122 the chuck power supply 150.