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Physical Sputtering and Ion Milling

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Physical Sputtering and Ion Milling

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Sputtering and ion milling are purely physical processes in which heavy atomic positive ions, created in a plasma, are accelerated to impact a substrate surface to remove material. The ion energies in these processes are high, often greater than 500 eV. Their primary advantage is the fact that they are highly anisotropic processes, producing features with near perfect vertical character. On the negative side, these processes are not particularly selective, having a tendency to etch all materials on the surface. Surface damage is also a problem in these processes. The etch rates that are achievable using physical sputtering are quite low when compared with chemical methods such as plasma etch and RIE.

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