UV etching accompanied by modifications. Surface etching

Surface photochemical etching accompanied by modification within the bulk of material is considered theoretically in quite general form. This problem permits analytical treatment and can be rigorously reduced to the ordinary differential equations. The symmetry of the obtained solutions allows representing the etching kinetics as joint propagation of wave of modification and etching front. This general formalism is applied to simplest variant of the model. The results are compared with the recent experimental data on UV laser etching of polymer films. It is shown that modeling based on the discussed mechanism is effective for relatively thick films. q1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.