AVS 52nd International Symposium
    Nanometer-Scale Science and Technology Monday Sessions
       Session NS2-MoM

Paper NS2-MoM9
Fabrication of Silicon Nanowires with Addressable Au-coated Si Islands

Monday, October 31, 2005, 11:00 am, Room 210

Session: Nanowires
Presenter: C. Wang, University of California, Irvine
Authors: C. Wang, University of California, Irvine
K.S. Ma, University of California, Irvine
M. Madou, University of California, Irvine
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With the increasing interest in various aspects of nano devices, it is becoming apparent that controlled growth is the key to manufacturing. The ability to control the growth of materials on the nanometer scale is important since it determines the device applications. Within many various material, Si nanowires (SiNWs) have attracted intensively research efforts in the synthesis and characterizations. The vapor-liquid-solid mechanism is the rife technique to growth SiNWs. The SiNWs were grown by decomposition of SiH4 as the Si atom sources. Most recently, the other approach, e.g. the solid-liquid-solid, has been developed. In this, the bulk Si wafers were used as either the substrates or Si sources. A thin Au layer was deposited on the substrate as catalyst. In this method, the SiNWs were directly deposited onto the conducting substrate. The post-growth processes are needed to employ those SiNWs as building blocks for the electronics. Herein, we report an alternative method to fabricate the SiNWs by adopting SLS mechanism. The addressable Au-coated Si islands were fabricated by lithography with lift-off on the SiO2 pre-coated substrate. The substrates were then heated to 900 ºC in N2/H2 gas. By this isolated Si islands technique, the grown SiNWs were settled down on the insulated substrate. By e-beam or optical lithography, the conducting electrodes can be fabricated on the wires. The islands are the starting point of the growth which can be served as the marker to localize the positions of SiNWs. By engineering design the size and position of the islands, the post-growth fabrication will be much easy instead of using alignment technique under the microscopes. We demonstrated a convenient technique to fabricate SiNWs of controllable position using SLS mechanism. The synthesized SiNWs were deposited on the non-conducting substrates. The widths of the wires are in the tens of nanometer range. The characterizations of synthesized SiNWs were carried out.