Silicon micromachining is the collective name for several processes by which three dimensional
structures may be constructed from or on silicon wafers. One of these
processes is anisotropic etching, which utilizes etchants such as KOH and ethylene
diamine pyrocatechol (EDP) to fabricate structures from the wafer bulk. This project is a
study of the use of KOH to anisotropically etch (lOO)-oriented silicon wafers. The thesis
provides a thorough review of the theory and principles of anisotropic etching as applied
to (100) wafers, followed by a few examples which serve to illustrate the theory. Next,
the thesis describes the development and experimental verification of a standardized
procedure by which anisotropic etching may be reliably performed in a typical research
laboratory environment. After the development of this procedure, several more etching
experiments were performed to compare the effects of various modifications of the etching
process. Multi-step etching processes were demonstrated, as well as simultaneous doublesided
etching using two different masks. The advantages and limitations of both methods
are addressed in this thesis. A comparison of experiments performed at different etchant
temperatures indicates that high temperatures (800 C) produces reasonably good results at
a very high etch rate, while lower temperatures (500 C) are more suited to high-precision
structures since they produce smoother, higher-quality surfaces.
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