Ether cleavage and chemical removal of SU-8

The high chemical stability of SU-8 makes it irreplaceable for a wide range applications, most notably as lithography photoresist micro and nanotechnology. This advantage becomes problem when there is need to remove from the fabricated devices. Researchers have been struggling two decades with this problem, although number partial solutions found, difficulty has limited applications SU-8. Here we demonstrate fast, reproducible, comparatively gentle method chemically photoresist. An ether cleavage mechanism observed reaction proposed, hypothesis tested ab initio quantum calculations. We also describe complementary removal based on atomic hydrogen inductively coupled plasma.