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Articles you may be interested inOn the scaling of rf and dc self-bias voltages with pressure in electronegative capacitively coupled plasmas J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 30, 021303 (2012); 10.1116/1.3676182Effect of copper emitted from wafers on etch rates of insulator films in capacitively coupled fluorocarbon plasma Effects of gas pressure and substrate temperature on the etching of parylene-N using a remote microwave oxygen plasma Films made of polydimethylsiloxane elastomers have been etched using reactive ion etching. The elastomers are etched using different mixtures of CF 4 , SF 6 , and O 2 as process gases. The etch rate and profile of the etched area are measured as function of the process pressure for different process gas compositions. At low pressure the highest etch rate is achieved in SF 6 +O 2 plasma. At high pressure the highest etch rate is achieved in CF 4 +SF 6 +O 2 plasma. The profile of the etched surface is strongly dependent on the process gas composition and the dc bias voltage in the plasma.

Soft polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) elastomers spin coated on silicon wafers are patterned using plasma etching. The elastomers are formed by mixing vinyl-terminated PDMS (prepolymer) and crosslinker containing hydride sites. The elastomers are made softer by adding either excess prepolymer, excess crosslinker, or swelling agent. The different elastomers were etched using reactive ion etching, an old and well established processing technology in the microelectronic and MEMS industry. The etch rate and profiles of the etched surfaces were dependent on the process pressure. The dependence was different for the different elastomers. It was found that at low pressure, the etch rate was dependent on the shear modulus. At high pressures, the etch rate was dependent on the chemical composition of the elastomer. The results for the swollen elastomers were different from those for the nonswollen elastomers. The etch rate was lower and the profiles of the etched cavities were different.

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This article studies electrostatic fields and potentials in the presence of conductors and point charges under the framework of solving Laplace’s equation with specifi ed boundary conditions. The results demonstrate that many problems posed and solved in elementary electrostatics through various heuristics such as the method of images, can be more rigorously treated under the solution framework of Laplace’s equation.