Even after careful mechanical milling, additional fine methods such as ion etching may be required to perform final stage thinning.

But ion etching has its disadvantages.

This is known as the chemical part of reactive ion etching.

Such anisotropy is maximized in deep reactive ion etching.

Reactive ion etching is an important extension that uses chemical reactivity to enhance the physical sputtering effect.

The interfaces are etched by reactive ion etching and then filled with photoresist.

Reactive ion etching is based on ionized, accelerated particles that etch both chemically and physically the substrate.

This chevron pattern is fabricated using wet or reactive ion etching.

The modification was discovered in the 1980s as an unwanted side effect of reactive ion etching (RIE).

Removing atoms by sputtering with an inert gas is called "ion milling" or "ion etching".