Technologies
Reactive ion etch (RIE)
RIE and its ICP variants shape the hard and exotic materials that define specialty semiconductors: silicon carbide trenches, GaN mesas, piezoelectric films, optical dielectrics. Each material system rewrites the rules — chemistry, damage behaviour and endpoint discipline all change.
What it does
Ion-assisted plasma chemistry etches materials that resist purely chemical attack, trading physical and chemical components to balance rate, selectivity, profile and subsurface damage. In compound semiconductors, the damage term is often the one that decides device performance.
Evaluation dimensions that decide projects
- Subsurface damage
- Especially for GaN/AlGaN and optical materials — provable only through device-relevant metrology, not visual inspection.
- Profile & surface quality
- Trench angle, corner rounding, micro-trenching and post-etch roughness on your material stack.
- Selectivity & endpoint
- To masks and stop layers, with endpoint strategies that survive production variation.
- Material breadth
- The realistic set of materials one chamber can serve without cross-contamination risk.
- Repeatability
- Chamber conditioning behaviour, first-wafer effects and drift over a production interval.
Questions worth asking early
How do we compare damage between platforms?
Define a device-relevant damage metric first — Schottky characteristics, PL intensity, breakdown or mobility — and require the same measurement on the same structure from every candidate.
One chamber or several?
Material sets with conflicting chemistries or contamination sensitivities may need dedicated chambers. That trade-off should be explicit at configuration time, not discovered later.
Have a structure, film or thermal step to discuss?
Send a short description of your application — device type, material, wafer size and what a good result looks like. An engineer will reply with a concrete next step.