High-speed wet etching of through silicon vias (TSVs) in micro- and nanoscale

In this paper, a novel wet etching method, named metal-assisted chemical etching (MaCE), is applied for through silicon vias (TSVs) fabrications. The influence of key experimental parameters in MaCE, including catalyst, etchant and dimension of TSVs are discussed. Especially, the type, geometry and morphology of catalyst are varied and the results are compared. A high etching rate over 10 μm/min and a high aspect ratio over 100 are observed in sub-micron scale TSV etching. The presented data demonstrates that MaCE is a promising candidate for TSVs etching with high speed, high aspect ratio capability, submicron capability and low cost.