Modeling of sloped sidewalls formed by simultaneous etching and deposition

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Abstract
Dry etching of microstructures in various materials has sometimes resulted in sidewalls which slope away from the mask edge. In this paper we model this phenomenon using a process of simultaneous isotropic deposition and anisotropic etching which has been shown by others to give good qualitative agreement with observed etched profiles. A simple analytical relationship between the etch and deposition rates of the deposited material is given and used to deduce a number of features of sloped sidewall etching. We compare these predictions with some experimental results gained using metal based compounds as the deposit material. We provide evidence suggesting that this metal compound deposition can explain a number of previous observations of sloped sidewalls.

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