Hi everyone So today I tried to etch the Nickel+Aluminum+Titanium stack with the dry etcher in order to get nice sharp wires and contact pads.

Well, now the long story: Everyone told me "we can't guarantee that works" and "no one has tried to dry etch nickel at NFF before" I asked Bao to help me try dry etch it and the result was absolutely shit. The Nickel didn't etch away but instead the Titanium and Aluminum started to over etch.

I consulted with CK (Bao's boss) and gave him the attached PDF to read.

He then came back to me with a printout of the paper and told me that in principle, it should be possible to do this with the AST.

While he was checking through the recipe list, he then discovered that there is already a recipe from the factory from which they bought it from, which does exactly what's described in the paper :D

Unfortunately, for bureaucratic reasons, I'm only getting full access to the machine on Tuesday, so I can't etch the wires before Tuesday, because wet etching does not work with a feature size of around 0.5 to 1.0 microns...

We need the dry etcher in order to avoid over etch.

So we have to wait until Tuesday, for the first preliminary SPICE models :-(

-lev