Reactive ion etch (RIE) is commonly used in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) fabrication as plasma etching method, where ions react with wafer surface substrate in plasma environment. Due to the importance of RIE in the MEMS field, two prediction models are established to predict the wafer status in reactive ion etching process: back-propagation neural network (BPNN) and principle componen...

Dry etching is an important process for micro- and nanofabrication. Sputtering effects can arise in two contexts within a dry-etch process. Incoming ions cause removal of volatile products that arise from the interaction between the dry-etch plasma and the surface to be etched. Also, the momentum transfer of an incoming ion can cause direct removal of the material to be etched, which is undesir...

A simple method for increasing the thermal efficiency of shape bimorph electrothermal micro-actuators is proposed, based on a reduction of gas conduction cooling beneath the hot arms by a deep, localized undercut. A single-sided, single-mask SCREAM-type process for fabricating differentially cooled actuators in a bonded silicon-on-insulator material is demonstrated. The process uses deep reacti...