Wafer-Scale, Highly-Ordered Silicon Nanowires Produced by Step-and-Flash Imprint Lithography and Metal-Assisted Chemical Etching

Abstract

ABSTRACTA combinatory approach of Step-and-Flash Imprint Lithography (SFIL) and Metal-Assisted Chemical Etching (MacEtch) was used to generate near perfectly-ordered, high aspect ratio silicon nanowires (SiNWs) on 4" silicon wafers. The ordering and shapes of SiNWs depends only on the SFIL nanoimprinting mould used, thereby enabling arbitary SiNW patterns not possible with nanosphere and interference lithography (IL) to be generated. Very densely packed SiNWs with periodicity finer than that permitted by conventional photolithography can be produced. The height of SiNWs is, in turn, controlled by the etching duration. However, it was found that very high aspect ratio SiNWs tend to be bent during processing. Hexagonal arrays of SiNW with circular and hexagonal cross-sections of dimensions 200nm and less were produced using pillar and pore patterned SFIL moulds. In summary, this approach allows highlyordered SiNWs to be fabricated on a wafer-level basis suitable for semiconductor device manufacturing.