Super-selective cryogenic etching for sub-10 nm features

Plasma etching is a powerful technique for transferring high-resolution lithographic masks into functional materials. Significant challenges arise with shrinking feature sizes, such as etching with thin masks. Traditionally this has been addressed with hard masks and consequently additional costly steps. Here we present a pathway to high selectivity soft mask pattern transfer using cryogenic plasma etching towards low-cost high throughput sub-10 nm nanofabrication. Cryogenic SF(6)/O(2) gas chemistry is studied for high fidelity, high selectivity inductively coupled plasma etching of silicon. Selectivity was maximized on large features (400 nm-1.5 μm) with a focus on minimizing photoresist etch rates. An overall anisotropic profile with selectivity around 140:1 with a photoresist mask for feature size 1.5 μm was realized with this clean, low damage process. At the deep nanoscale, selectivity is reduced by an order of magnitude. Despite these limits, high selectivity is achieved for anisotropic high aspect ratio 10 nm scale etching with thin polymeric masks. Gentler ion bombardment resulted in planar-dependent etching and produced faceted sub-100 nm features.