Chemical etching is employed as micromachining manufacturing process to produce micron-size components. As a semiconductor wafer is extremely expensive due to many processing steps involved in the making thereof, the need to critically control the etching end point in an etching process is highly desirable. It was found that not only the etchant and temperature determine the exact anisotropy of etched silicon. The angle between the silicon surface and the mask was also shown to play an important role. In this paper, angular dependence of the etching rate is calculated on the base of the silicon symmetry properties, by means of the interpolation technique using experimentally obtained values of the principal <100>, <110>, <111> directions in KOH solutions. The calculations are performed using an extension of the sparse field method for solving three dimensional (3D) level set equations that describe the morphological surface evolution during etching process. The analysis of the obtained results confirm that regardless of the initial shape the profile evolution ends with the crystal form composed of the fastest etching planes, {110} in our model

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In this paper, fabrication of silicon microchannels with integrated obstacles by using 25 wt.% tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH) aqueous solution at the temperature of 80?C is presented and analysed. We studied basic island patterns, which present union of two symmetrical parallelograms with the sides along predetermined crystallographic directions <n10> (2<n<8) and <100>. Acute angles of the parallelograms were smaller than 45?. We have derived analytical relations for determining dimensions of the integrated obstacles. The developed etching technique provides reduction of the distance between the obstacles. Before the experiments, we performed simulations of pattern etching based on the level set method and presented evolution of the etched basic patterns for the predetermined crystallographic directions <n10>. Combination of basic patterns with sides along the <610> and <100> crystallographic directions is used to fabricate a matrix of two row of silicon obstacles in a microchannel. We obtained a good agreement between the experimental results and simulations. Our results enable simple and cost-effective fabrication of various complex microfluidic silicon platforms with integrated obstacles.

In this paper we discuss how a better understanding of thermal and mainly non-thermal plasmas provides basis for their application in a number or nanotechnologies. One should bear in mind that one may design unique properties of plasmas thus affecting very directly properties of the resulting nanostructures. A number of examples where plasmas contribute to production of nanomaterials, modification of surfaces and functionalization at nanoscales are given here. Plasmas are not a panacea but in nanotechnology their application may be the best strategy to convert production of individual structures to massively parallel production that may become a viable industrial technology.