Single- and multi-directional slanted plasma etching of silicon under practical plasma processing conditions

A novel plasma etching technique was developed to obtain singleand multi-directional slanted etch profiles of silicon using a Faraday cage system. Etching was performed by a cyclic process consisting of alternating etching and deposition steps using SF6 and C4F8 plasmas, respectively, under practical plasma processing conditions. The single-directional slanted plasma etching was achieved using a Faraday cage with a single horizontal grid plane. Mask erosion characteristics played an important role in the prediction and control of the etch profiles during the single-directional slanted plasma etching. Multi-directional, such as double and quadruple, slanted plasma etchings were also performed with Faraday cages with two and four slanted-grid planes, respectively. This work offers a novel method for performing singleand multi-directional slanted plasma etchings of silicon under practical plasma processing conditions. © The Author(s) 2014. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 License (CC BY-NC-ND, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is not changed in any way and is properly cited. For permission for commercial reuse, please email: oa@electrochem.org. [DOI: 10.1149/2.0091411jss] All rights reserved.