Silicon surface with oxygen

At ordinary temperatures, the metal surface is coated with a very fine thin amorphous film of its dioxide, about 2 to 3 nm thick. Silicon combines with oxygen forming innumerable silicates. A few silicates have been mentioned above. 

The most commonly used insulator in semiconductor devices is silicon dioxide (Si02), which is typically formed on the surface of the silicon wafer by thermal oxidation of the surface with oxygen or water vapor at a temperature between 1000 and 1200°C. It is also possible to deposit the oxide layer onto a substrate that is not... 

Reactive cleaning uses liquids, gases, vapors, or plasmas to react with the contaminant to form a volatile or soluble reaction product. If non-volatile products result from the reaction (e.g. silicone oil with oxygen to form silica) then a residue is left on the surface. 

Compounds of silicon with oxygen are prevalent in the Earth s crust. About 95% of crastal rock and its various decomposition products (sand, clay, soil) are composed of silicon oxides. In fact, oxygen is the most abundant element in the Earth s crast (45% by mass) and silicon is second (27%). In the Earth s surface layer, four of every five atoms are silicon or oxygen. 

Six elements are metalloids B, Si, Ge, As, Sb, and Te. Of these, silicon is by far the most abundant, making up over 27% of the Earth s crust, more than any other element except oxygen, hi fact, S1O2 and silicate minerals account for 80% of the atoms near the Earth s surface. Despite its great abundance, silicon was not discovered until 1824, probably because the strong bonds it forms with oxygen makes silicon difficult to isolate. Two much rarer metalloids, antimony (known to the ancients) and arsenic (discovered ca. 1250 ad) were isolated and identified long before silicon. 

Whatever the initial step of formation of surface silyl radicals, the mechanism for the oxidation of silicon surfaces by O2 is expected to be similar to the proposed Scheme 8.10. This proposal is also in agreement with the various spectroscopic measurements that provided evidence for a peroxyl radical species on the surface of silicon [53] during thermal oxidation (see also references cited in [50]). The reaction being a surface radical chain oxidation, it is obvious that temperature, efficiency of radical initiation, surface precursor and oxygen concentration will play important roles in the acceleration of the surface oxidation and outcome of oxidation. 

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