There is a growing interest to develop a new cleaning technology to overcome the disadvantages of wet cleaning technologies such as environmental pollution and the cleaning difficulty of contaminants on integrated circuits. Laser cleaning is a potential technology to remove various pollutants on a wafer surface. However, there is no fundamental data about cleaning efficiencies and cleaning mechanisms of contaminants on a wafer surface using a laser cleaning technology. Therefore, the cleaning characteristics of a wafer surface using an excimer laser were investigated in this study. Fingerprint consisting of inorganic and organic materials was chosen as a representative of pollutants and the effectiveness of a laser irradiation on a wafer cleaning has been investigated qualitatively and quantitatively. The results have shown that cleaning degree is proportional to the laser irradiation time and repetition rate, and quantitative analysis conducted by an image processing method also have shown the same trend. Furthermore, the cleaning efficiency of a wafer contaminated by fingerprint strongly depended on a photothermal cleaning mechanism and the species were removed in order of hydrophilic and hydrophobic contaminants by laser irradiation.