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Dry etching had not yet come into its own back in
1981. Barrel Etchers had been in use for almost five years but were
successful mostly when used as ashers to remove photoresist. Planar
etching began to make some headway soon after with Alan Reinberg’s
invention of the parallel plate reactor. Soon Reactive Ion Etch (RIE)
entered the scene. It offered substantially better etch uniformity
when processing wafers one at a time, but was very slow. The
DRIE-100 was one of the first machines to offer multiple wafer
planar reactive ion etch. Despite that, other single wafer etching
suppliers had gained the upper hand and Drytek was eventually
absorbed into Lam Research. Many of the advances made in this
machine survive in modern descendants.
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