Low resistivity metal silicide nanowires with extraordinarily high aspect ratio for future nanoelectronic devices.

One crucial challenge for the integrated circuit devices to go beyond the current technology has been to find the appropriate contact and interconnect materials. NiSi has been commonly used in the 45 nm devices mainly because it possesses the lowest resistivity among all metal silicides. However, for devices of even smaller dimension, its stability at processing temperature is in doubt. In this paper, we show the growth of high-quality nanowires of NiSi(2), which is a thermodynamically stable phase and possesses low resistivity suitable for future generation electronics devices. The origin of low resistivity for the nanowires has been clarified to be due to its defect-free single-crystalline structure instead of surface and size effects.