Spectrophotometric determination of silicon in ultrapure, dilute hydrofluoric acid solutions

A new analytical procedure is described for the spectrophotometric determination of silicon in ultrapure, dilute hydrofluoric acid (HF) solutions. The method is a variation of the classical molybdenum blue method, but adds optimised quantities of boric acid to eliminate any HF interference in the colorimetric process. Its sensitivity and detection limit have been evaluated as, respectively, (180 ± 9) · 10− 5/(μg/L Si) and 7.6 μg/L Si, and its reproducibility has been confirmed. The method has also been successfully applied and validated for the determination of the etch rate of single crystalline silicon surfaces in ultrapure 2% v/v HF solutions.