The formation of volume elements for microelectromechanical systems in polyimide by method of reactive ion beam etching

The main problem related to the creation of microelectromechanical systems—the formation of an anisotropic profile with vertical side walls and clean flat bottom in a thick resist film—is experimentally solved by optimizing the parameters of the reactive ion beam etching process for polyimide (PI) layers with a thicknesses up to 50 μm. The optimized technique was used to form the volume parts of a microelectromotor structure by etching a PI film with an oxygen ion beam (beam current density j=0.5 mA/cm²; ion extraction energy U=800 V).