F20 with standard spot and reflection probe
Porous Silicon
There has been a great deal of R&D work done on porous silicon in recent years. Much of the interest is due to porous silicon's significant promise for use in a wide range of applications, including optical devices, gas sensors, and biomedical devices.
As with most new material technologies, part of the challenge of porous silicon development has been the finding tools with which to characterize various material parameters. For porous silicon, the most fundamental parameters of interest are layer thickness and porosity.
Other important parameters relate to processed layers, such as the fraction of impregnated materials or the amount of adsorbed molecules in sensing devices. Filmetrics® has developed a unique analysis algorithm that reveals layer thickness, index, and porosity of porous silicon with a single mouse-click. This algorithm is available at no charge on various F20, F40, and F50 instruments.
Contact our thin-film experts to discuss your porous silicon application.
Filmetrics offers free trial measurements - results are typically available in 1-2 days
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Porous Silicon Thickness Measurement Example
Porous silicon layers can be characterized by many parameters, but thickness and porosity are the principal ones. In general, non-destructive methods like gravimetric measurements are used to measure porosity, but the accuracy of this method is very low. The Filmetrics F20, which uses a non-destructive technique, can measure the thickness and optical properties of porous silicon film. Filmetrics proprietary algorithm also allows calculating the porosity of the film accurately just with a single mouse-click.
