Formation of Porous Silicon Filter Structures with Different Properties on Small Areas

Porous silicon (PS) layer systems have a broad range of possible applications. An advantage is the good control of the refractive index and the etch rate of the layers by the applied current density and the time respectively. For micro-optical devices you need patterned PS. For some optical devices it is not sufficient to have only one filter but it is necessary to form filters with different properties on a small area. We applied a method (M. Frank, U.B. Schallenberg, N. Kaiser, and W. Buß, in Conference on Miniaturized Systems with Microoptics and Micromechanics, edited by M.E. Moamedi, L.J. Hornbeck, and K.S.J. Pister (SPIE, San Jose, 1997), SPIE Proceedings Series 3008, p. 265) to PS which fits this goal by the following steps: fabrication of the desired reflectors below each other and partial removal of upper reflectors with reactive ion etching (RIE). The technological aspects of patterning PS after the fabrication are an important topic of this work. Problems are discussed in detail and solutions are given.