Deep germanium etching using time multiplexed plasma etching

Rapid Sacrificial Germanium Etching Using Xenon Difluoride

We present a novel micromachining procedure employing the noble gas halide, xenon difluoride (XeF2), to rapidly undercut a sacrificial layer comprised of low-temperature deposited amorphous germanium (α-Ge). As a proof of concept, this process is utilized to fabricate electrostatically-actuated suspended Bragg mirrors applicable to wavelength-tunable surface-normal photonic devices. Exploiting ...

Time-multiplexed-plasma-etching of High Numerical Aperture Paraboloidal Micromirror Arrays

This paper presents a time-multiplexed plasma-etching method for high numerical aperture paraboloidal micromirrors. By designing the appropriate opening and spacing of etching windows, one can fabricate micromirror arrays with varying focal lengths within one batch. INTRODUCTION Curved micromirrors, including various existing deformable micromirrors, e.g. [1-3], have many applications in micro-...

Numerical Simulation of Bosch Processing for Deep Silicon Plasma Etching

We present a simulation of the Bosch process using the feature-scale modeling software FPS3D. FPS3D is a generic simulator that can be applied to any set of materials, plasmas, reactive gases, and reactions for both 2D and 3D simulations of etching and deposition. FPS3D can simulate multi-time-step processes for which the fluxes, species, reactions, ion energies, angular distributions, and othe...

Deep Reactive Ion Etching (DRIE)

Plasma atomic layer etching using conventional plasma equipment

The decrease in feature sizes in microelectronics fabrication will soon require plasma etching processes having atomic layer resolution. The basis of plasma atomic layer etching PALE is forming a layer of passivation that allows the underlying substrate material to be etched with lower activation energy than in the absence of the passivation. The subsequent removal of the passivation with caref...