Monolithic fabrication of vertical silicon nanowire gas sensor with a top porous copper electrode using glancing angle deposition

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics volume 32, pages5233–5242(2021)Cite this article

Abstract

Vertical Si nanowire (SiNW) gas sensor with a top porous electrode (TPE) has been reported as a highly sensitive, small footprint, and mass-producible gas sensor platform. In this article, a monolithic fabrication process for a vertical SiNW gas sensor using glancing angle deposition (GLAD) was proposed as a simple, low-cost, and large-area fabrication method, and the performance of the fabricated vertical SiNW gas sensor was evaluated via relative humidity measurement. The 1,000 nm length vertical SiNWs were uniformly fabricated on a 4-inch silicon wafer via GLAD at an oblique angle of 85° and a substrate rotation speed of 5 rpm. A Cu TPE was also fabricated via sequential GLAD without substrate rotation to realize the wafer-level vertical gas sensor from which multiple 2 × 2 cm2 vertical SiNW gas sensors were obtained by dicing. To optimize the Cu TPE fabrication process, the effects of oblique angle and deposition thickness on the conductivity and porosity of the TPE were examined; subsequently, an oblique angle of 65° and a thickness of 100 nm were selected as the optimum conditions when considering humidity measurement sensitivity.

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Data availability

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

Abbreviations

NW:

Nanowire

TPE:

Top porous electrode

SiNW:

Si nanowire

GLAD:

Glancing angle deposition

E-beam:

Electron-beam

SEM:

Scanning electron microscopy

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Funding

This work was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (NRF-2020R1H1A2011487) and also supported by the Chung-Ang University Research Scholarship Grants in 2019.

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Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Chung-Ang University, 06974, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Naseem Abbas, Jun Kim, Jeongwoo Yeom, Xun Lu & Seok-min Kim

  2. Department of Mechanical System Engineering, Chung-Ang University, 06974, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Seongmin Lee & Seok-min Kim

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chung-Ang University, 06974, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Seongmin Lee & Seok-min Kim

  4. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Yanbian University, 133002, Yanji, China

    Xun Lu

Authors
  1. Naseem Abbas
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  2. Jun Kim
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  3. Jeongwoo Yeom
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  4. Seongmin Lee
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  5. Xun Lu
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  6. Seok-min Kim
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Contributions

SK, XL, NA conceptualized and designed the experiments, NA, JK, JY, SL conducted the experiments, SK, XL, NA wrote and revised the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Seok-min Kim.

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Abbas, N., Kim, J., Yeom, J. et al. Monolithic fabrication of vertical silicon nanowire gas sensor with a top porous copper electrode using glancing angle deposition. J Mater Sci: Mater Electron 32, 5233–5242 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-021-05255-4

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