This grant provides funding to develop a gas phase process to integrate nanowires on surfaces. The approach is to install and characterize a dual reactor system for the insitu formation of seed particles (reactor 1) and nanowire growths (reactor 2) under controlled conditions. The reactors will be connected with a gas phase handling system to transport and deposit seed particles onto the target wafer. The wires will be grown at elevated temperatures and the morphology, composition, and orientation will be compared with solution based growth methods. The intellectual merit of this proposal is to demonstrate and advance knowledge of novel insitu gas phase integration processes that aim at integrating nanowires at addressable regions on a surface. The proposed integration system will provide answers on the ultimate limit in the diameters of the nanowires that can be formed using size classified seed particles.
Few methods to this effect currently exist and are all afflicted with their problems. Hence, each element of this work could have tremendous impact. Seed particles could be created in the vapor phase, where they could be processed using well established methods. The ability to localize nanowires of arbitrary materials on arbitrary substrates could allow the merging of technologies based on otherwise incompatible materials. The ability to integrate different nanomaterial based devices on a single substrate will reduce the lengths of interconnects, in turn, devices and systems performance would improve and less processing steps should be required to realize a desired system. The methods and processes developed under this proposal may thus have a significant impact on the progress of nanotechnology in general.
