Fabrication of large arrays of high-aspect-ratio single-crystal silicon columns with isolated vertically aligned multi-walled carbon nanotube tips

This paper describes the fabrication of large arrays (10(6) units in 1 cm(2)) of 100 µm tall, single-crystal silicon columns with submicron tip cross-sections. The columns are formed using thin film deposition and growth, reactive ion etching, and deep reactive ion etching. The columns can be either slightly tapered or have pencil-like morphology with nanoscaled tip diameter (41 nm). Conformal thin film coating was used to substantially and uniformly modify the porous structure and, thus, vary by orders of magnitude the fluid permeability of the structure. Gaps between the vertical pillars were varied between 9 µm and 50 nm. Isolated 45 nm diameter, 5 µm tall plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposited multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) were grown on the top surface of the columns using a 7 nm thick evaporated Ni film as catalyst. Field emission characterization of the resulting structure was conducted and it is in agreement with scanning electron micrographs of the MWNTs.