Superfine IC geometries: Gas-plasma etching may supplant chemical etching in manufacturing high-performance integrated circuits

To a microlithographer who prepares patterns of integrated circuits on semiconductor materials, a design as narrow as a 100-micrometer-wide human hair would be simply too bulky to be of practical use. The semiconductor industry routinely produces patterns with features much smaller than these, and these patterns are made in large quantities to exacting specifications. A hundred or more production steps must be performed on a thin slice of silicon before the IC chip is finished and can go into a growing line of products. One of these steps is etching, and here the focus of attention among semiconductor vendors is shifting to dry etching.