High aspect ratio silicon ring-shape micropillars fabricated by deep reactive ion etching with sacrificial structures

Abstract

This paper presents the fabrication of widely-spaced high aspect ratio ring-shape pillars (i.e. hollow pillars). Lateral etching of the pillars during deep reactive ion etching is challenging. To reduce this problem, we proposed adding sacrificial structures surrounding the pillars such that the lateral etching mainly occurs on the sacrificial structures. We designed two different kinds of sacrificial structures, one is circular ring structures surrounding the pillars, the other one is two half circle structures with two small gaps. Both sacrificial structures could help to fabricate pillars with vertical sidewalls. When the width of the sacrificial structures was well designed for a given etching condition, the sacrificial structures could be removed by ultrasonic agitation after the process with clean surface because they had been weakened by the lateral etching. Using this method, 2D widely-spaced ring-shape pillar array with 470 μm high pillars (diameter 200 μm, aspect ratio 2.35) and 370 μm deep holes (diameter 80 μm, aspect ratio 4.63) was fabricated simultaneously.