Massive fabrication of silicon nanopore arrays with tunable shapes

This paper presents an improved wet etching method for the massive production of silicon nanopore arrays. The shape (length-width ratio) of the nanopore can be easily tuned by changing the wet etching mask and controlling the etching time. By adopting silicon on insulator (SOI) wafers, the pore size uniformity of the nanopore arrays was significantly improved. Square and rectangular nanopore arrays with feature pore sizes down to 18 nm were controllably fabricated. Experiments demonstrated that such Si nanopore arrays with tunable pore shapes and sizes can act as reusable stencils for the nanostencil lithography, to directly deposit large-scale ordered arrays of surface micro/nano structures on various substrates with less time and low cost.