Porous Silicon in Practice: Preparation, Characterization and Applications

The first concise and didactic practical introduction to the preparation and characterization of porous silicon nanostructures.
By means of electrochemical treatment, bulk silicon can be surface modified to be covered with tiny, nanoscale pores that entirely change the characteristics and properties of the material. One prominent example of this are living cells, which are totally unwilling to settle on smooth silicon surfaces but readily accept porous silicon as a substrate to grow on, giving rise to great hopes for interfaces between electronics and living tissue for such future applications as human/machine interfaces or advanced, brain-controlled prosthetics.
Written by an outstanding, well-recognized expert in the field, this book introduces the electrochemical and synthetic methods, as well as characterization techniques and applications for porous silicon.
From the contents:
* Etch Cells: Construction and Considerations
* Choice of Silicon
* Etching Silicon
* Patterning Porous Si
* Preparing Free-standing Films and Particles of Porous Si
* Measurement of Infrared Spectra
* Measurement of Optical Properties
* Measurement of Pore Size, Porosity, Thickness, Surface Area
The whole is backed by a generous use of color photographs to illustrate the described procedures in detail, plus a bibliography of further literature pertinent to a wide range of application fields.
For materials scientists, chemists, physicists, physicochemists, semiconductor physicists, neurobiologists, bioengineers, and graduate students, as well as those working in the semiconductor industry.