Morphological and photoluminescence study of porous thin SiC layer grown onto silicon

Abstract

A porous SiC layer was fabricated by anodization of a 1.6 μm-thin SiC layer deposited onto p-type Si(100) substrate by pulsed laser deposition (PLD), using a hot-pressed 6H-SiC(p) as sputtered target. P-type porous SiC layers were realized by anodization in HF/ethylene glycol (ETG) electrolyte (1:1 by vol.) at different etching times. The properties of the porous SiC layer formed by this method were investigated by SIMS, SEM, Fourier transform Infra-Red spectroscopy (FT-IR) and photoluminescence (PL). The results show that the growth layer was crystalline, with the photoluminescent spectra showing a blue band emission. In addition, the results clearly indicate an increase in PL intensity by 10 times of magnitude compared to that exhibited by the unetched sample. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.