Vapor phase silicon etching assisted by graphene oxide for microsized pillar fabrication

Abstract Carbon-based materials such as graphene-derivatives are attracting attention for the fabrication of silicon micro- or nano- structure. Owing to their catalytic activity towards oxidants, the silicon covered by them is preferentially dissolved. In this paper, we investigated some etching parameters in the vapor phase GO-assisted silicon etching for microsized pillar fabrication. The analysis of the etching rate and XPS revealed that GO was very stable after a long duration of etching in this system. Moreover, intrinsic defects, rather than oxygen functional groups, dominate the contribution to etching behavior, according to the comparison between GO and photochemically reduced GO. Finally, we succeeded in fabricating the microsized pillars using the vapor phase etching combined with the microcontact printing of GO sheets. The vapor phase etching enables large-scale silicon fabrication, and this facile method can be suitable for various applications.