Dry Etching of Stainless Steel Using a Silicon Hard Mask

Abstract

At present, there is no suitable mask for the etching process to fabricate micron-level textures on stainless steel. In this paper, we take advantage that Si can be processed as fine structures with a high aspect ratio. We fabricated Si structures with through-holes of 2μm width. This Si structure was applied as a hard mask for dry etching based on Ar⁺ ions of stainless steel,and the aspect ratio obtained is about 2, the effectiveness of Si hard mask is confirmed.