A New Approach to Fabricate Vertically Stacked Single-Crystalline Silicon Nanowires

A new method to fabricate vertically stacked single-crystal silicon nano-wires (SiNW) has been developed and presented in this work. This process combines an Inductive Coupled Plasma (ICP) Dry Etch with subsequent Bosch cycle treatment followed by a one-step Self-Limiting Thermal Oxidation. An N-l number of elevated SiNW cores corresponding to N Bosch cycles are experimentally demonstrated with smallest feature size down to 15 nm in diameter. It is shown that the circular and elliptical eccentricity of the stacked cores can be controlled by varying the processing conditions. The stress effect on the core size evolution and distribution is discussed.