Modeling and characterization of sacrificial polysilicon etching using vapor-phase xenon difluoride

Author

Brazzle, John D. ; Dokmeci, M.R. ; Mastrangelo, Carlos H.

Author_Institution

Corning IntelliSense Corp., Wilmington, MA, USA

fYear

2004

fDate

2004

Firstpage

737

Lastpage

740

Abstract

Xenon Difluoride is an isotropic dry etch which is increasingly being used to release structures made of polysilicon. By using a vapor-phase XeF₂ pulse etching system we have investigated the effects of aperture size and thickness of polysilicon films versus etch rates. Decreasing the aperture size resulted in reduced etch rates. For a 100 μm wide structure the etch rates varied from 1.38 μm/min (1.25 μm thick polysilicon) down to 0.41 μm/min (0.1 μm thick polysilicon). Rate constants are obtained for a modified, aperture-dependent Deal-Grove model from the experimental data.

Keywords

elemental semiconductors; etching; micromechanical devices; semiconductor process modelling; semiconductor thin films; silicon; 0.1 micron; 1.25 micron; 100 micron; Si; aperture size; aperture-dependent Deal-Grove model; micromechanical devices; polysilicon films; sacrificial polysilicon etching; sputter etching; vapor phase xenon difluoride; Apertures; Dry etching; Fabrication; Hafnium; Microelectromechanical devices; Resists; Silicon compounds; Temperature; Wet etching; Xenon;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, 2004. 17th IEEE International Conference on. (MEMS)

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8265-X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/MEMS.2004.1290690

Filename

1290690