Reactive Ion Etching Equipment Design

Reactive ion etching (RIE), as one of dry etching technologies, was originated in the 1970's. Although several new dry etching techniques come forth during the past decades, RIE is still widely applied in the field of semiconductor industry and microfabrication in virtue of its good etching capabilities which can etch both metal and dielectric. Dry etching technologies, especially RIE is described resumptively in this paper, more over, the mechanism and process technology of RIE is also expatiated.A system design of reactive ion etcher, which is based on the demand of photonic crystal fabrication, is presented in this paper from the angle of research and experiment. And then the demonstration is also presented. The system employs conventional configuration of parallel plate reactive ion etcher. This equipment, with good performance/price ratio, is anticipated to obtain more desirable etching resolution and profile, because the system design is optimized reasonably and high-quality assemblies have been chosen. Furthermore, the installation, maintenance and improvement of the equipment are all simple and convenient due to the building block design.