Fabrication of nanoline arrays of noble metals by electroless plating and selective etching process

The fabrication of one-dimensional metallic nanostructures has attracted much attention because they can be utilized to components of nanoelectronic devices. In this paper, we report the fabrication of nanoline array composed of Cu, Au, Cu/Ag by the electroless plating and etching technique. In all case, the metallic layers uniformly coated the template surface with sub-100 nm thickness. Bilayer structure of Cu and Ag layer was also formed by the sequential plating of Ag and Cu. Top layer and the template were selectively removed by dry etching process with Ar, H₂ and O₂. Nanoline array of Cu, Au, and Ag/Cu were finally formed on a Si wafer. The width of the metallic line is close to the thickness of the original coating layer. Our process provides the rapid and cost-efficient nanofabrication of metal nanoline.