Micromachining optical arrays

This paper describes two fabrication techniques-dry and wet etching- for microstructured optical arrays (MOAs). The MOAs consist of arrays of channels deep etched in silicon. They use grazing incidence reflection to focus the X-rays through the consecutive aligned arrays of channels, ideally reflecting once off a vertical and smooth channel wall in each array. The MOAs were proposed by the Smart X-ray Optics (SXO) programme as small scale optics for micro-probing of biological cells and tissues. The first fabrication method requires inductively coupled plasma (ICP) using Bosch processes. The second one involves etching silicon wafers in alkaline solutions.