Tuning the surface conditioning of trapezoidally shaped silicon nanowires by (3-aminopropyl)triethoxysilane.

We report on the electrical performance of silane-treated silicon nanowires configured as n + – p – n + field effect transistors. The functionalization of the silicon oxide shell with (3-aminopropyl)triethoxysilane controls the formation of the conduction channel in the trapezoidal cross-section nanowires. By carefully adjusting the surface conditioning protocol, robust electrical characteristics were achieved in terms of device-to-device reproducibility for the studied silicon nanowire transistors: the standard deviation displays a fourfold decrease for the threshold voltage together with a sevenfold improvement for the subthreshold slope.