Atomistic simulations of surface coverage effects in anisotropic wet chemical etching of crystalline silicon

Atomistic simulations of anisotropic wet chemical etching of crystalline silicon have been performed in order to determine the dependence of the etch rates of different crystallographic orientations on surface coverage and clustering of OH radicals. We show that the etch rate is a non-monotonic function of OH coverage and that there always exists a coverage value at which the etch rate reaches a maximum. The dependence of the anisotropy of the etching process on coverage, including the dependence of the fastest-etched plane orientation, is implicitly contained in the model and predictions of convex corner under-etching structures are made. We show that the whole etching process is controlled by only a few surface configurations involving a particular type of next-nearest neighbours. The relative value of the removal probabilities of these configurations determines the balance in the occurrence of step propagation and etch pitting for all surface orientations.