Aluminum and gold nanowires were fabricated using 100 mm stencil wafers containing nanoslits fabricated with a focused ion beam. The stencils were aligned and the nanowires deposited on a substrate with predefined electrical pads. The morphology and resistivity of the wires were studied. Nanowires down to 70 nm wide and 5 µm long have been achieved showing a resistivity of 10 µΩcm for Al and 5 µΩcm for Au and maximum current density of ∼10 8 A/cm 2 . This proves the capability of stencil lithography for the fabrication of metallic nanowires on a full wafer scale.An important objective in nanotechnology is the development of alternative nanopatterning methods and the fabrication of novel nanoscale structures and materials. Among such structures, nanowires (NWs) have shown potential and applications in a broad range of fields such as electronics, 1,2 magnetic memories, 3 thermoelectric, 4,5 nanomechanical, 6 optoelectronic, 7 and biosensing devices 8-10 due to their physical properties and surface to volume ratio. In particular, metallic nanowires can be applied for interconnects, magnetic memories based on spin-polarized current 3 and biosensors. 9 To fabricate NWs, the two approaches used are the chemical synthesis (bottom-up) and the nanopatterning methods (topdown).

A quantitative analysis of blurring and its dependence on the stencil-substrate gap and the deposition parameters in stencil lithography, a high resolution shadow mask technique, is presented. The blurring is manifested in two ways: first, the structure directly deposited on the substrate is larger than the stencil aperture due to geometrical factors, and second, a halo of material is formed surrounding the deposited structure, presumably due to surface diffusion. The blurring is studied as a function of the gap using dedicated stencils that allow a controlled variation of the gap. Our results show a linear relationship between the gap and the blurring of the directly deposited structure. In our configuration, with a material source of ∼5 mm and a source-substrate distance of 1 m, we find that a gap size of ∼10 μm enlarges the directly deposited structures by ∼50 nm. The measured halo varies from 0.2 to 3 μm in width depending on the gap, the stencil aperture size and other deposition parameters. We also show that the blurring can be reduced by decreasing the nominal deposition thickness, the deposition rate and the substrate temperature.

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