Vacuum plasma etching

Semiconductor industry, vacuum chamber applications, clamp rings for gas plasma etching equipment, wafer retaining rings for gas plasma etching, vacuum tips. .. 

A wide spectrum of heterogeneous processes can occur at solid surfaces exposed to a glow discharge (5,25,27). The primary processes of interest in plasma etching (and in plasma deposition) are summarized in Table II i20). These interactions result from the bombardment of surfaces by particles. Although vacuum UV photons and soft x-rays present in the plasma are sufficiently energetic to break chemical bonds, electron and particularly ion bombardment has been found to be the most effective method of promoting surface reactions (25). 

The desired thickness of the film for the solar sail application was 2.5 ym, but the thinnest commercially available film of this type was Du Font s Kapton O) with a thickness of <7.5 ym. Hence, a need existed to thin the latter film and to assess the photo-and thermal stability of the resulting, thinned film. This paper describes the use of a radiofrequency (RF) oxygen plasma for etching (thinning) of poly[, N-oxydiphenylene) pyromellitimide] (POP) film, and presents data on the photo/thermal degradation of etched and unetched film in vacuum. Although plasma etching has been applied to many polymers, it has scarcely been used on... 

Plasmas for etching are formed by applying a radio-frequency electric field to a gas held at low pressure in a vacuum chamber (upper part of Fig. 5.1.8). This makes plasma etching more expensive than wet etching. 

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