In this work, the thermal reactive ion etching (TRIE) technique for etching hard-to-etch materials is presented. The TRIE technique employs a self-heated cathode and a thermally insulated aluminum plate is placed on the cathode of a regular reactive ion etching (RIE) system. By optimizing the beam size to support the sample stage, the temperature of the stage can be increased to a desired temperature without a cathode heater. The technique was used to etch a bulk titanium plate. An etch rate of 0.6 mu m/min and an etch selectivity to nickel of 100 were achieved with SF6 plasma. The proposed technique makes a regular RIE system a more powerful etcher without the use of chlorine gas, a cathode heater, and an inductively coupled plasma source. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.