Micro and nanomaching of materials and devices are performed with techniques that physically modify their surface and/or the bulk, such as Reactive Ion Etching (RIE) and fs-Laser Patterning, differing in the physical mechanisms producing the modifications and in the processing logics.
RIE is used to etch various materials under vacuum in the presence of reactive ions. The purpose of the RIE machine is usually to etch patterns of materials by using a chemically reactive gas in plasma state. The plasma is generated by an electromagnetic field and directed towards a substrate patterned with photo-lithographic technique or a hard mask. High-energy ions from the plasma can physically and/or chemically etch the material under treatment or react with its surface to remove atoms from the target material with high anisotropy. Etched depths of tens of micrometers with resolution correlated with the used lithographic technique can be obtained with the setup available at the DiaTHEMA Lab in the Montelibretti Section.
Laser patterning is a technique based on the direct writing of the materials at the the micro- and the nanoscales. The modifications provided by the interaction with the ultrashort-pulse laser beam can be used for controlling the surface properties as well as can be employed for fabricating complex 3D channels into the bulk of solid materials. The achievable resolution is sub-micrometric and the applications can be in optics, photonics, microfluidics, electronics. The setup consists of the Ti:sapphire femtosecond laser (pulse length of about 100 fs) and the nanoresolution workstation Newport MicroFab, located in the Tito Scalo Section and managed by FemtoLAB and DiaTHEMA Lab.
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