Interfacial Contact is Required for Metal-Assisted Plasma Etching of Silicon.

ABSTRACT: For decades, fabrication of semiconductor devices has utilized well-established etching techniques to create complex nanostructures in silicon. The most common dry process is reactive ion etching which fabricates nanostructures through the selective removal of unmasked silicon. Generalized enhancements of etching have been reported with mask-enhanced etching with Al, Cr, Cu, and Ag masks, but there is a lack of reports exploring the ability of metallic films to catalytically enhance the local etching of silicon in plasmas. Here, metal-assisted plasma etching (MAPE) is performed using patterned nanometers-thick gold films to catalyze the etching of silicon in an SF₆/O₂ mixed plasma, selectively increasing the rate of etching by over 1000%. The catalytic enhancement of

SUBMITTER: Sun JB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6314446 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature