Silicon microstructures through the production of silicon nanowires by metal-assisted chemical etching, used as sacrificial material

Abstract

A simple, inexpensive and wafer-scale method to obtain Si microstructures is proposed. The method consists in a sequence of steps that include a selective metal-assisted chemical etching process to create regions of Si nanowires that are sacrificed in a post-etching process, leaving microstructures standing. As a proof of concept, Si micropillars with length of 7 µm and diameter of 1.4 µm were fabricated. The advantage of the proposed method is its simplicity, allowing the production of microstructures in a basic chemical laboratory.