Enhanced control of porous silicon morphology from macropore to mesopore formation

Porous silicon (PSi) is a versatile material that possesses a wide range of morphologies. There are two main types of microstructures that are widely used and well studied: branchy mesoporous silicon with pore sizes from 10 nm to 50 nm and classical macroporous silicon with pore sizes from 500 nm to 20 mu m. Much less work has been done on structures with intermediate pore sizes from 100 nm to 300 nm. Applications such as immunoassays biosensing can greatly benefit from the intermediate morphology due to the larger pore openings compared to mesopores, and increased internal surface compared to classical macropores. In this work we demonstrate well-defined macropore of 150 nm diameter in average and precise control of the porous silicon morphology transition from smooth macropores to branchy mesopores on one substrate with one electrolyte. A multilayer structure (microcavity) consisting of both mesopores and macropores is presented. (c) 2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.