Wet Scandium Etching for hard mask formation on a silicon substrate

TL;DR

This paper introduces scandium as a new hard mask material for silicon etching, demonstrating its high resistance to plasma etching and successful patterning with wet etching techniques for microfabrication.

Contribution

It presents the novel use of scandium as a hard mask material for silicon, showing its effectiveness in patterning at microscale resolutions.

Findings

Scandium exhibits high plasma etching resistance.

Wet etching of scandium achieves 4-micron pattern resolution.

Scandium hard mask enables new microscale patterning possibilities.

Abstract

Nowadays, microelectronics and nanoelectronics require the search for new materials, including masks for creating structures. Today, the intermediate hard mask strategy is one of the key issues in achieving a good balance between lithography and etching at the microelectronic fabrication. One of the interesting challenges in microelectronics and photovoltaics is the creation of interspacing, vertically oriented silicon arrays on Si substrate for semiconductor devices with multi-function. The fabrication of such structures is still a serious technological problem and requires searching for new approaches and materials. In this work, we propose using scandium as a new hard mask material over silicon due to its high resistance to plasma chemical etching and low sputtering coefficient. We have shown that a wet etching of the scandium layer with a thickness of several nanometers can be used to obtain pattern structures with a resolution of up to 4 microns, which is a good result for the wet etching approach. Scandium metal was found to be an excellent resistant mask over silicon under the selected plasma etching conditions. Therefore, a scandium hard mask can open up new possibilities for the formation of different microscale topographical patterns.