Fabrication and operation of microplasma reactor array for maskless nanoscale material etching

This paper reports a novel maskless nanoscale material etching method based on microplasma reactor array with advantages of high etching efficiency, high fidelity, simple-structure, and flexible to etching various material. A 2×2 inverted pyramidal microplasma reactor array with each cavity dimension of 50μm was successfully fabricated by MEMS process. Experiment results showed that the devices could operate in rare gas Ar under dc excitation. V-I characteristics of the microplasma reactor array at 10kpa of Ar with different ballast resistances were presented. The work in this paper may lay a good foundation for maskless nanoscale material etching.