Wafer-level microstructuring of glassy carbon

Abstract

Glassy carbon is used nowadays for a variety of applications because of its mechanical strength, thermal stability and non-sticking adhesion properties. One application is glass molding that allows to realize high resolution diffractive optical elements on large areas and at affordable price appropriate for mass production. We study glassy carbon microstructuring for future precision compression molding of low and high glass-transition temperature. For applications in optics the uniformity, surface roughness, edge definition and lateral resolution are very important parameters for a stamp and the final product. We study different methods of microstructuring of glassy carbon by etching and milling. Reactive ion etching with different protection layers such as photoresists, aluminium and titanium hard masks have been performed and will be compare with Ion beam etching. We comment on the quality of the structure definition and give process details as well as drawbacks for the different methods. In our fabrications we were able to realize optically flat diffractive structures with slope angles of 80° at typical feature sizes of 5 micron and 700 nm depth qualified for high precision glass molding.