AVS 51st International Symposium
    MEMS and NEMS Tuesday Sessions
       Session MN-TuM

Invited Paper MN-TuM1
C-MEMS/NEMS: A Novel Technology for Graphite, Ni, and Si Nanoscale Material Formation

Tuesday, November 16, 2004, 8:20 am, Room 213C

Session: MEMS and NEMS: Enabling Tools for Scientific Research
Presenter: M. Madou, University of California at Irvine
Authors: M. Madou, University of California at Irvine
C. Wang, University of California at Irvine
R. Zaouk, University of California at Irvine
K. Malladi, University of California at Irvine
L. Taherabadi, University of California at Irvine
Correspondent: Click to Email
Carbon microelectromechanical systems (C-MEMS) and carbon nanoelectromechanical system (C-NEMS) have received much attention because of the many potential applications. BioMEMS applications include: DNA arrays, glucose sensors, microbatteries and biofuel cells. Microfabrication of carbon structures using current processing technology, including focused ion beam (FIB) and reactive ion etching (RIE), is time consuming and expensive. Low feature resolution, and poor repeatability of the carbon composition as well as widely varying properties of the resulting devices limits the use of screen printing of commercial carbon inks for C-MEMS. Our newly developed C-MEMS microfabrication technique is based on the pyrolysis of photo patterned resists. Using a suitable catalyst, graphite nanofibers and Ni nanowires were formed. Unlike conventional CVD methods for growing nanotubes in which a gaseous carbon source, such as CH4, is commonly used, we use photoresist as carbon source. Furthermore, Si nanowires were successfully grown without photoresist patterns and a modified solid-liquid-solid (SLS) mechanism was used to explain our results.