Studying the Effect of Different Etching Parameters on the Physical Properties of Porous Silicon Prepared By Electrochemical Etching

Abstract

In this work we prepared a porous Silicon (PS) layer by electrochemical etching (ECE) technique using different etching parameters including current density, anodization time and Hydrofluoric (HF) acid concentration. From the structural properties, we found that the full width half maximum of the observed spectrum from the XRD analysis has been increased and the peak position is slightly shifted to higher value. Also the etching parameters effect on the pore diameter and in turn on all chemical compositional and optical properties. As well as for electrical properties, the barrier height increases with pore diameter and the depletion width as well. From these result, it can tell that PS layer is better than c-Si for many applications.