Self-controlled fabrication of single-crystalline silicon nanobeams using conventional micromachining

This paper reports on a low-cost top-down approach to the nano-precision fabrication of nanobeams on single-crystalline silicon using only conventional micromachining technology. The fabrication technique takes advantage of the crystalline structure of silicon for controllable feature size reduction of nanobeams with atomically smooth surfaces and sharp edges. Applying a deliberate rotational misalignment in a 2 μm resolution standard lithography process, followed by anisotropic wet etching of the silicon, nanobeams with well uniform widths as small as ∼85 nm are fabricated on thin SOI substrates. As a proof of concept for the incorporation of such nanobeams within electromechancial structures, we successfully demonstrate thermally actuated resonators that show very high frequencies (close to 50 MHz).