Thermal reactive ion etching technique involving use of self-heated cathode.

In this work, the thermal reactive ion etching (TRIE) technique for etching hard-to-etch materials is presented. The TRIE technique employs a self-heated cathode and a thermally insulated aluminum plate is placed on the cathode of a regular reactive ion etching (RIE) system. By optimizing the beam size to support the sample stage, the temperature of the stage can be increased to a desired temperature without a cathode heater. The technique was used to etch a bulk titanium plate. An etch rate of 0.6 µm/min and an etch selectivity to nickel of 100 were achieved with SF6 plasma. The proposed technique makes a regular RIE system a more powerful etcher without the use of chlorine gas, a cathode heater, and an inductively coupled plasma source.

Miniature quartz crystal-resonator-based thermogravimetric detector.

In this work, a new design for a microheater combined with a quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) array for thermogravimetric analysis is presented. Each QCM consists of two electrodes to excite thickness-shear-mode vibrations and one microheater to increase the temperature on the crystal backside. In addition, all the electrode pads are patterned on the crystal backside, making the design of the QCM compact and user-friendly. Finally, the proposed QCM array was employed to separate ethanol from methanol. This was successfully achieved via thermal desorption spectra calculated by differentiating the frequency changes.