Dry etch fabrication of porous silicon using xenon difluoride

The authors report the fabrication of porous silicon material using a xenon difluoride (XeF2) dry etching technique. Using a XeF2 fabrication process, porous silicon can be formed selectively on silicon by employing a standard hard-baked photoresist layer as a masking layer. The authors demonstrate porous silicon with different pore sizes and configurations rendering this material as an attractive candidate for a wide spectrum of potential applications. The pore size, porosity and thickness of the various developed porous silicon samples were characterised with electron microscopy and optical reflectance measurements. This XeF2 etching technique offers flexible and straightforward fabrication of porous silicon and could allow simple monolithic integration of porous silicon devices with microelectronic circuitry, following the current trend of integrated microsystems.

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