Fabrication of Laterally Displaced Porous Silicon Filters

Porous silicon superlattices have been used to manufacture laterally displaced dielectric filters with different optical properties on one substrate. Two different fabrication processes for two-colour microfilter arrays are presented. Both methods overcome the problem of non-uniform optical properties of the well-known procedure where two filter stacks are grown one upon another, with subsequent partial removal of the upper filter by reactive ion etching. The novel methods give uniform optical properties of the two filter areas, profiting from the main property of the formation process of porous silicon: the formation of porous silicon occurs only at the porous silicon substrate interface.