A Novel Top-Down Fabrication Process for Vertically-Stacked Silicon-Nanowire Array

Silicon nanowires are widely used for sensing applications due to their outstanding mechanical, electrical, and optical properties. However, one of the major challenges involves introducing silicon-nanowire arrays to a specific layout location with reproducible and controllable dimensions. Indeed, for integration with microscale structures and circuits, a monolithic wafer-level process based on a top-down silicon-nanowire array fabrication method is essential. For sensors in various electromechanical and photoelectric applications, the need for silicon nanowires (as a functional building block) is increasing, and thus monolithic integration is highly required. In this paper, a novel top-down method for fabricating vertically-stacked silicon-nanowire arrays is presented. This method enables the fabrication of lateral silicon-nanowire arrays in a vertical direction, as well as the fabrication of an increased number of silicon nanowires on a finite dimension. The proposed fabrication method uses a number of processes: photolithography, deep reactive-ion etching, and wet oxidation. In applying the proposed method, a vertically-aligned silicon-nanowire array, in which a single layer consists of three vertical layers with 20 silicon nanowires, is fabricated and analyzed. The diamond-shaped cross-sectional dimension of a single silicon nanowire is approximately 300 nm in width and 20 μm in length. The developed method is expected to result in highly-sensitive, reproducible, and low-cost silicon-nanowire sensors for various biomedical applications.