ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the problems of theoretical and experimental research into the mechanisms of plasma-chemical and ion-chemical surface etching as well as the problems related to developing models and methods for surface etching with off-electrode plasma. To investigate the formation mechanism of optical microreliefs observed in the catalytic-mask method, similarly prepared samples on silicon substrates were used. The mechanism can be used for describing the etching of other materials with low-temperature plasma as well as multicomponent plasma. The method used to monitor the surface temperature of samples in an experimental investigation into the relationship between the etch rate and substrate temperature in off-electrode plasma. The etch rate is calculated for both the U values entered in the database and the intermediate values, and the linear-interpolation method is used for the calculations. The evaluation of off-electrode plasma etching in terms of uniformity showed that both plasma-chemical etching and ion-chemical etching are uniform.
