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Ion milling is a specialized physical etching technique that is a crucial step in the preparation of material analysis techniques. After a specimen goes through ion milling, the surface becomes much smoother and more defined, which allows scientists to study the material much easier.
Removing atoms by sputtering with an inert gas is called ion milling or ion etching. Sputtering can also play a role in reactive-ion etching (RIE), a plasma process carried out with chemically active ions and radicals, for which the sputtering yield may be enhanced significantly compared to pure physical sputtering.
Another ion source seen in commercially available instruments is a helium ion source, which is inherently less damaging to the sample than Ga ions although it will still sputter small amounts of material especially at high magnifications and long scan times. As helium ions can be focused into a small probe size and provide a much smaller sample ...
Ion milling, or sputter etching, uses lower pressures, often as low as 10 −4 Torr (10 mPa). It bombards the wafer with energetic ions of noble gases, often Ar +, which knock atoms from the substrate by transferring momentum. Because the etching is performed by ions, which approach the wafer approximately from one direction, this process is ...
Reactive-ion etching (RIE) is an etching technology used in microfabrication. RIE is a type of dry etching which has different characteristics than wet etching . RIE uses chemically reactive plasma to remove material deposited on wafers .
This is known as the chemical part of the reactive ion etching. There is also a physical part, if ions have enough energy, they can knock atoms out of the material to be etched without chemical reaction. There are two main technologies for high-rate DRIE: cryogenic and Bosch, although the Bosch process is the only recognised production technique.
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An ion beam is a beam of ions, a type of charged particle beam. Ion beams have many uses in electronics manufacturing (principally ion implantation) and other industries. There are many ion beam sources, some derived from the mercury vapor thrusters developed by NASA in the 1960s. The most widely used ion beams are of singly-charged ions.