Large-Area Free-Standing Ultrathin Single-Crystal Silicon as Processable Materials

Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 2013 papers

Abstract

Silicon has been driving the great success of semiconductor industry, and emerging forms of silicon have generated new opportunities in electronics, biotechnology, and energy applications. Here we demonstrate large-area free-standing ultrathin single-crystalline Si at the wafer scale as new Si materials with processability. We fabricated them by KOH etching of the Si wafer and show their uniform thickness from 10 to sub-2 μm. These ultrathin Si exhibits excellent mechanical flexibility and bendability more than those with 20-30 μm thickness in previous study. Unexpectedly, these ultrathin Si materials can be cut with scissors like a piece of paper, and they are robust during various regular fabrication processings including tweezer handling, spin coating, patterning, doping, wet and dry etching, annealing, and metal deposition. We demonstrate the fabrication of planar and double-sided nanocone solar cells and highlight that the processability on both sides of surface together with the interesting property of these free-standing ultrathin Si materials opens up exciting opportunities to generate novel functional devices different from the existing approaches.

Related Papers

• → Chemical Etching of InGaAsP / InP DH Wafer(1982)45 cited
• → Photoluminescence of Semi‐insulating InP Wafers Prepared by Two‐Step Wafer Annealing(1998)4 cited
• → Study the effect resistivity slide and the time of etching on silicon surfaces morphology of producing photovoltaic method(2023)1 cited
• → Improvement of Cr dry etching characteristics with the MERIE system(2000)2 cited
• Study on Reducing the Warp of InP Wafer(2014)