Morphology and formation mechanisms of porous silicon

Porous silicon exhibits extremely rich morphological features resulting from a set of very complex reaction processes at the silicon/electrolyte interface. Numerous theories have been proposed since its discovery more than four decades ago, but there is still a lack of complete understanding of the formation mechanisms with respect to the observed morphological details. This paper attempts to provide a conceptual analysis of the various aspects in the morphology and formation mechanisms of porous silicon in light of currently available information on the fundamental reaction processes on silicon electrodes. (C) 2003 The Electrochemical Society.