Horizontally grown silicon nanowire arrays for large scale integration

Chemically grown semiconducting nanowire is a promising candidate for future electronics since this bottom-up approach produces smooth nanowires with nanometer-scale control. However, most of the nanowire devices and circuits have been made from randomly positioned wires and are not suitable for large-scale integration, which requires precise control of the position and orientation of each nanowire. One solution is the controlled growth of horizontal nanowire arrays which allows large scale integration and simple electrical contacting scheme. However, previous efforts in growing horizontal nanowires included out-of-plane growth and lacked precise position control. This thesis presents the fabrication of gold dot arrays on shallow, atomically smooth sidewalls, controlled growth of epitaxial silicon nanowires which have the direction orthogonal to the sidewalls and electrical contacting schemes of these nanowires to form field effect transistors. Our approach, which is suitable for large scale integration of nanowires, is distinct from other research in that it simultaneously meets three requirements: horizontal growth, controlled position and orientation, and growth on an insulator. Silicon nanowire was chosen in this work and practically, the result from this work can be expanded to other high carrier mobility material nanowires. In addition, the advantage of precise control of the position and orientation of each horizontal nanowire makes it possible to realize CMOS circuits with both PMOS and NMOS devices on neighboring nanowires, which has not been realized with randomly positioned nanowires that allow only one or the other