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. © 2003 The Electrochemical Society. All rights reserved.