Review Article: Hydrogen blistering of silicon: Progress in fundamental understanding

Abstract

AbstractThe understanding of blistering mechanisms at the fundamental, atomic‐scale level is still not complete, but large strides towards that goal have been made in the last decade. In this issue's Review Article [1] Bernard Terreault gives a comprehensive survey of this progress, discussing the current questions as well as outlining suggestions for future work.The related cover picture shows atomic force micrographs of a variety of surface morphologies obtained by hydrogen ion implantation into silicon followed by rapid thermal annealing. In this particular case, the ions were implanted through PMMA masks of decreasing width (from left to right, 6 μm, 1 μm, 600 nm and 150 nm) [2]. This is but one application of blistering, the most common being ion‐cutting and layer transfer as used in the commercial production of silicon‐on‐insulator wafers.The author is Honorary retired Professor at the EMT (Energy, Materials, Telecom) Center of the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (Université du Québec).Another feature included in the current issue is the Editor's Choice contribution ‘Optical and micro‐analytical study of a copper–conjugated polymer composite’ by Kaushik Mallik et al. [3], where the authors investigate a nanoscale fiber network for potential application in microelectronic systems.