In today’s world everything is going toward speed and comfort. This includes different
technologies which their improvement leads to an easier life for human beings. One of these
technologies is nanotechnology that deals with fabrication and structures of objects in nanometer
scale.
Today’s technology and science has proved that nanowires are excellent candidates for
fabrication of many different devices and their components. These devices take less space while
having high performance. Nanowires are one-dimensional structures that have many applications
including a variety of sensors, transistors as well as energy-storage devices like solar cells and
Li-ion batteries.
Fabrication of nanowires is still under research and many universities and institutes are trying to
find methods that are both time- and cost-efficient. This is a challenging subject since there are
many parameters involved in the process and each of these parameters affect the final results of
fabrication.
The concentration of this work is on fabrication of silicon nanowires. Silicon is the second-most
abundant element on the earth and therefore has a more reasonable price compare to other
elements.
There are many different techniques to fabricate silicon nanowires but most of these methods are
expensive and time consuming.
In this work we have used a top-down method which is time and cost efficient compare to other
fabrication methods. There are three main steps in our work; anisotropic etching to texture the
surface of the silicon wafer, electrochemical etching to produce the nanowires and a post-etching
process in order to clean the surface of the sample. Wafer type, etching duration, temperature,
and the applied current are the parameters that are studied during the experiments. The fabricated
nanowires are captured and characterized using scanning electron microscopy.