Fabrication of thin vertical mirrors through plasma etch and KOH:IPA polishing for integration into MEMS electrostatic actuators
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We developed a process for the fabrication of thin vertical mirrors as integrated structures of MEMS electrostatic actuators. The mirrors can be implemented as a vertical extension of the actuator sidewall, or can be positioned at any movable part of the actuator. The process involves the fabrication of a mesa structure on the handle layer of a silicon-oninsulator (SOI) wafer through deep reactive ion etching (DRIE). The etch/passivation cycles of the DRIE process were optimized to achieve vertical etch profiles with a depth of up to 200 μm with an aspect ratio of 10:1. The DRIE process introduced typical etch scallops with peak-to-valley and rms roughnesses on the order of 100 nm and 30 nm, respectively. A mask layer was used to pattern a 2.1 μm sacrificial oxide layer for the mesa structure. A second mask layer allowed us to define a large etch cavity for handle layer back-etch. The DRIE etched mesa structure was then etched with diluted potassium hydroxide (KOH) in isopropyl alcohol (IPA). Temperature and etch concentration were optimized for the removal of etch scallops without the formation of ⟨111⟩ etch facets. The etch scallops were almost completely removed and mirror quality surfaces were achieved. The developed mesa structures are suitable for integration into actuators that are patterned in the device layer. A third masking layer, aligned through infrared camera, was used to position the thin vertical mirror at the actuator sidewall. The process provides design flexibility in integrating vertical mirrors of adjustable dimensions to movable elements of MEMS structures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".