Prepared For Maskless Etching Of Micro-plasma Reactor And Performance Testing

Plasma Etching is widely used because of the superiority of higher etching rate, good directivity, material selectivity and so on. However, in the traditional process, plasma act on whole surface of the sample, which require costly equipments and complicated process for patterning transfer. Recently, some researchers confine the plasma in the Microstructure less than 1mm to realize local maskless etching. These devices can only achieve hundred-micron resolution, but can't expect more. Here, we propose a Maskless Scanning Plasma Ecthing System(MSPE) based on Parallel Probe Actuation, in which a Inverted Pyramidal Microplasma Reactor (IPMR) is integrated on the scanning probe and released nano-aperture at the tip of the hollow cavity. Plasma produced in SF6 are exported through the aperture to etch the silicon wafer underneath, which can achieve submicron resolution.IPMR, having metal(Ni) /dielectric(PI) /metal(Ni) sandwich structure with inverted pyramidal hollow cathode, is the key component of MSPE. In this thesis, we study the structure optimization, fabrication process, testing system and device performance. IPMR is integrated on the scanning probe, which influence the distribution of electric field and the plasma in the hollow cathode. Therefore, we do some simulation for the electric field using ANSYS software to investigate the influence of the electrode and dielectric layer, and to obtain the better structure to produce and maintain plasma.Due to the deep inverted pyramidal hollow cavity, the process such as fabrication of PI, patterning of anode and PI are much harder. To solve these difficulty, we do work as following:(1)Realize the anode patterning using the sputtering reversal lift-off process, which improve the electrode accuracy, quality and simplify the process. (2) Investigate influence of curing parameters on the thickness, imidation degree and dielectric property of PI, then optimize them to gain favorable PI layer. (3)Optimize the reactive ion etching parameters to improve the etching rate and ensure the pattering quality. Based on the optimized process, we fabricate the favorable IPMR. Finally, we set up the measurement system to test the electrical and optical property of the device discharged stably in SF6, and analyse the analysis the influence of the device characteristic dimension, pressure, gas component and the test circuit on the discharge, which lay a foundation for further research of the MSPE.