Group IV Nanowires: Fabrication and Particular Applications

Group IV semiconductor nanowires (NWs) are very attractive because of the variety of possible applications as well as of the good silicon (Si) compatibility, which is important for their integration into the existing semiconductor technology.

We will give an overview of our activities on fabrication and application of group IV NWs. These include top-down fabrication (based on electron beam lithography and reactive ion etching) of Si and germanium (Ge) NWs having widths down to 6-7 nm as well as bottom-up (vapour-liquid-solid, VLS) growth of alloyed germanium-tin (Ge1-xSnx) NWs with x = 0.07-0.1 and diameters of 50-70 nm. We will also discuss the innovative nanoelectronic devices that we are working on: junctionless nanowire transistors (JNTs) and reconfigurable field effect transistors (RFETs). In particular, we will present results on Si JNTs for sensing application as well as on Ge and GeSn JNTs for digital logic. We will also show results on Si RFETs as well as preliminary data on SiGe and GeSn RFETs, which are expected to outperform the Si RFETs.