Atomic mixing and preferential sputtering impose a depth resolution limit on the use of sputter sectioning to measure the composition of metal-semiconductor interfaces. Experimental evidence obtained with the Pt-Si system is used to .demonstrate ion-induced atomic mixing and then its effect on sputter etching and depth profiling. Starting with discrete layer structures, a relatively low ion dos...

We present three-dimensional simulation techniques for plasma etching processes. Models based on Langmuir-type adsorption and on ballistic particle transport at feature scale can be efficiently solved in three dimensions. Surface coverages are self-consistently calculated. The local sputter rates of ions and the fluxes of neutrals are computed using modern ray tracing algorithms. In this way an...

In conventional sputter etching, heterogeneous surfaces are eroded at generally unpredictable rates. The reasons for this are discussed and a solution to the problem is given: Based on control of redeposition, the technique involves the use of a device called a “catcher,” which is placed near the target of the sputtering chamber to trap re-emitted particles. Experiments are described which conf...

Chemical etching is widely applied to texture the surface of sputter-deposited zinc oxide for light scattering in thin-film silicon solar cells. Based on experimental findings from the literature and our own results we propose a model that explains the etching behavior of ZnO depending on the structural material properties and etching agent. All grain boundaries are prone to be etched to a cert...

Fabrication of ultrasharp probes is of interest for many applications, including scanning probe microscopy and electron-stimulated patterning of surfaces. These techniques require reproducible ultrasharp metallic tips, yet the efficient and reproducible fabrication of these consumable items has remained an elusive goal. Here we describe a novel biased-probe field-directed sputter sharpening tec...

Several silicon dioxide chemical vapor deposition processes using high density plasma sources have been recently proposed in the literature [4,6] for deposition of self-planarizing inter-level dielectric deposition. All these processes exhibit the competitive effect of simultaneous deposition and etching mechanisms. In previous papers [1,2,3], a level set approach was developed for etching and ...

Metal assisted photochemical etching (MAPCE) of 4H Silicon Carbide (SiC) was utilized to generate locally defined porous areas on single crystalline substrates. Therefore, Platinum (Pt) was sputter deposited on 4H-SiC substrates and patterned with photolithography and lift off. Etching was performed by immersing the Pt coated samples into an etching solution containing sodium persulphate and hy...

Random surface roughness very often can occur during the growth or etching of films under non-equilibrium conditions. Several competing mechanisms such as noise, surface diffusion, and shadowing all play a role in the evolution of surface roughness. However, recent results obtained in many growth and etching processes exhibit an unusual tendency: the morphology is very rough where it is expecte...

Feature-scale simulation of sputter etching has been coupled to equipment parameters by means of transferring angular distributions of ions as provided by equipment simulation to our simulation code. Etching is modeled by performing ion flux integration for all node positions on a discretized 3D surface, taking into account shadowing by the geometry, the angular distribution of ions, and the sp...