Simple, Fast, and Cost‐Effective Fabrication of Wafer‐Scale Nanohole Arrays on Silicon for Antireflection

Abstract

A simple, fast, and cost‐effective method was developed in this paper for the high‐throughput fabrication of nanohole arrays on silicon (Si), which is utilized for antireflection. Wafer‐scale polystyrene (PS) monolayer colloidal crystal was developed as templates by spin‐coating method. Metallic shadow mask was prepared by lifting off the oxygen etched PS beads from the deposited chromium film. Nanohole arrays were fabricated by Si dry etching. A series of nanohole arrays were fabricated with the similar diameter but with different depth. It is found that the maximum depth of the Si‐hole was determined by the diameter of the Cr‐mask. The antireflection ability of these Si‐hole arrays was investigated. The results show that the reflection decreases with the depth of the Si‐hole. The deepest Si‐hole arrays show the best antireflection ability (reflection < 9%) at long wavelengths (>600 nm), which was about 28 percent of the nonpatterned silicon wafer’s reflection. The proposed method has the potential for high‐throughput fabrication of patterned Si wafer, and the low reflectivity allows the application of these wafers in crystalline silicon solar cells.