Fabrication of silicon nanopore arrays using a combination of dry and wet etching

摘要

This paper presents a novel method for the fabrication of silicon nanopore arrays. The proposed method is based on inductive coupled plasma (ICP) etching and a two-step anisotropic wet etching, and can be used to fabricate individual nanopores, and massive nanopore arrays, with lower cost and less time compared with conventional fabrication processes. To optimize this nanopore fabrication process, the size of the ICP etch window was determined in a series of ICP experiments, and a theoretical analysis of the two-step wet etching was conducted. A nanopore array with an average feature size of 130 nm and a rectangular nanopore with a feature size of 38 nm were successfully obtained using this method. These results indicate the potential of this method for the large-scale production arrays of nanopores with desired sizes and shapes.