An environmentally friendly, and contamination free process for etching and cleaning semiconductors is critical to future of the IC industry. Under the right conditions, water has the ability to meet these requirements. Water becomes more reactive as a function of temperature in part because the number of hydronium and hydroxyl ions increase. As water approaches its boiling point, the concentration of these species increases over seven times their concentrations at room temperature. At 150 °C, when the liquid state is maintained, these concentrations increase 15 times over room temperature. Due to its enhanced reactivity, high temperature water (HTW) has been studied as an etch and clean of thermally grown SiO2, Si3N4, and low-k films. High temperature deuterium oxide (HT-D2O) behaves similarly to HTW; however, it dissociates an order of magnitude less than HTW resulting in an equivalent reduction in reactive species. This allowed for the effects of reactive specie concentration on etch rate to be studied, providing valuable insight into how HTW compares to other high temperature wet etching processes such as hot phosphoric acid (HPA). Characterization was conducted using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) to determine chemical changes due to etching, spectroscopic ellipsometry to determine film thickness, profilometry to measure thickness change across the samples, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), contact angle to measure changes in wetting behavior, and UV-Vis spectroscopy to measure dissolved silica in post etch water. HTW has demonstrated the ability to effective etch both SiO2 and Si3N4, HT-D2O also showed similar etch rates of Si3N4 indicating that a threshold reactive specie concentration is needed to maximize etch rate at a given temperature and additional reactive species do not further increase the etch rate. Because HTW has no hazardous byproducts, high temperature water could become a more environmentally friendly etchant of SiO2 and Si3N4 thin films.

Nowadays, the systems that allow simultaneous employment of both focused electron and ion beams are very important tools in the field of micro- and nanotechnology. In addition to imaging and analysis, they can be used for lithography, which is applied for preparation of structures with required shapes and dimensions at the micrometer and nanometer scale. The first part of the thesis deals with one lithographic method – focused electron or ion beam induced deposition, for which a suitable adjustment of exposition parameters is searched and quality of deposited metal structures in terms of shape and elemental composition studied. Subsequently, attention is paid also to other types of lithographic methods (electron or ion beam lithography), which are applied in preparation of etching masks for the subsequent selective wet etching of silicon single crystals. In addition to optimization of mentioned techniques, the application of etched silicon surfaces for, e.g., selective growth of metal structures has been studied. The last part of the thesis is focused on functional properties of selected 2D or 3D structures.

The task of master’s thesis was to perform optimalization process for preparing metal etching mask by electron beam litography and subsequent selective wet ething of silicon with crystalographic orientation (100). Further characterization of etched surface and fabricated structures was performed. In particular, attention was given to the morphology demonstrated by scanning electron microscopy and study changes of the optical properties of gold plasmonic antennas due to their undercut.