PDMS films of 10 μm thickness can be patterned within 30 min by combining dry etching to achieve substantially vertical sidewalls with wet etching to achieve high etch rates and to protect the underlying substrate from attack. Dry etching alone would have taken 5 h, and wet etching alone would produce severe undercutting. In addition, using either technique alone produces undesirable surface mo...

The fabrication of ordered arrays of nanoporous Si nanopillars with and without nanoporous base and ordered arrays of Si nanopillars with nanoporous shells are presented. The fabrication route is using a combination of substrate conformal imprint lithography and metal-assisted chemical etching. The metal-assisted chemical etching is performed in solutions with different [HF]/[H2O2 + HF] ratios....

Inductively coupled plasma etching using Cl2–H2 chemistry with no additive gas CH4, Ar, or N2 is studied to realize deep 5 m ridges with smooth and vertical sidewalls. The process is optimized for nonthermalized InP wafers to avoid the use of thermal grease. Cleaning of the rear side of the wafer after etching is avoided, which is suitable for an industrial process or for critical subsequent st...

Sapphire nanopatterning is the key solution to GaN light emitting diode (LED) light extraction. One challenge is to etch deep nanostructures with a vertical sidewall in sapphire. Here, we report a study of the effects of two masking materials (SiO2 and Cr) and different etching recipes (the reaction gas ratio, the reaction pressure and the inductive power) in a chlorine-based (BCl3 and Cl2) ind...

Parylene C, an emerging material in microelectromechanical systems, is of particular interest in biomedical and lab-on-a-chip applications where stable, chemically inert surfaces are desired. Practical implementation of Parylene C as a structural material requires the development of micropatterning techniques for its selective removal. Dry etching methods are currently the most suitable for bat...

A free-space silicon one-dimensional photonic bandgap optical filter is designed and fabricated. A two-stage (110) wafer etching process is employed to form the extremely vertical, smooth, and high-aspect-ratio features that are essential for good optical properties. The (111) oriented planes of the wafer form <0.01 degrees off-vertical trenches that make up the Fabry-Perot filter. A simulation...

A polarization-independent, high-index contrast grating (HCG) with a single layer of cross stripes allowing simple fabrication is proposed. Since the cross stripes structure can be suspended in air by selectively wet-etching the layer below, all the layers can be grown at once when implemented for vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers. We optimized the structure to have a broad and high refle...

We demonstrate wide-area fabrication of sub-40 nm diameter, 1.5 µm tall, high aspect ratio silicon pillar arrays with straight sidewalls by combining nanoimprint lithography (NIL) and deep reactive ion etching (DRIE). Imprint molds were used to pre-pattern nanopillar positions precisely on a 200 nm square lattice with long range order. The conventional DRIE etching process was modified and opti...

A vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser ~VCSEL! having a two-dimensional ~2-D! photonic crystal structure on its surface has been investigated for single-lateral-mode operation. We evaluated the effective index change of a VCSEL cavity introduced by a 2-D pattern. Our experimental results showed good agreement with a theoretical model in which the influence of a finite etching depth was taken ...