The Structure of Oxide Film on the Porous Silicon Surface

A prolonged stay of porous silicon in the air environment gives rise to structural changes in its surface layer, and the standard single-layer model is not sufficiently accurate to describe them. In this work, the structure of the near-surface layer in porous silicon is studied using the polygonal ellipsometry method. A combined approach is proposed to analyze the angular ellipsometry data for the parametersψandΔ. It consists in the application of the multilayer medium model and the matrix method, while simulating the propagation of optical radiation in this medium in order to obtain the theoretical angular dependences of tanψ and cos Δ. In this method, the dependence of the sought optical profile on the specimen depth is an additional condition imposed on the multilayer model. Evolutionary numerical methods are used for finding the global minimum of the mean squared error (MSE) between the corresponding theoretical and experimental dependences, and the parameters of an optical profile are determined. A model in which the inner non-oxidized layer of porous silicon is homogeneous, whereas the refractive index in the outer oxidized layer has a linear profile, is analyzed. It is shown that the linear and two-step models for the refractive index of an oxidized film provided the best agreement with the experimental ellipsometric functions. The adequacy of the theoretical model is also confirmed by determining the color coordinates of the specimen. (author)