Fabrication and characterization of highly doped suspended silicon wires

Highly doped suspended silicon wires are fabricated on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer. The fabrication is based on a three-mask process which uses only standard photolithography, wet etching, and thermal treatments. The starting material was highly doped by means of the spin-on-dopant technique and wires with dimensions in the nanometer range were obtained. Preliminary results about two-probe measurements of the I-V characteristics and a noise analysis of undamaged and damaged wires are presented and discussed.