Fabrication of CMOS-compatible nanopillars for smart bio-mimetic CMOS image sensors

In this paper, nanopillars with heights of 1μm to 5μm and widths of 250nm to 500nm have been fabricated with a near room temperature etching process. The nanopillars were achieved with a continuous deep reactive ion etching technique and utilizing PMMA (polymethylmethacrylate) and Chromium as masking layers. As opposed to the conventional Bosch process, the usage of the unswitched deep reactive ion etching technique resulted in nanopillars with smooth sidewalls with a measured surface roughness of less than 40nm. Moreover, undercut was nonexistent in the nanopillars. The proposed fabrication method achieves etch rates four times faster when compared to the state-of-the-art, leading to higher throughput and more vertical side walls. The fabrication of the nanopillars was carried out keeping the CMOS process in mind to ultimately obtain a CMOS-compatible process. This work serves as an initial step in the ultimate objective of integrating photo-sensors based on these nanopillars seamlessly along with the controlling transistors to build a complete bio-inspired smart CMOS image sensor on the same wafer. © 2012 IEEE.