Slotted substrates and techniques for forming same

Techniques for fabricating an inkjet printhead include providing a printhead substrate (100), fabricating a thinfilm structure (101) on the substrate, forming a break trench (124) in a surface region of the substrate in which a feed slot is to be formed, and subsequently abrasively machining the substrate through the break trench to form the feed slot (126). The break trench can be formed by an etch process, prior to applying a barrier layer (112) to the thinfilm structure in a preferred embodiment.