Strain Engineering Investigations for Optimization of Suspended Top-Down Fabricated Silicon Nanowires

This work presents a stress characterization study of highly strained silicon nanowires (sSiNWs) based on finite element method (FEM) simulations, providing an alternative to conventional Raman spectroscopy. The results demonstrate that strain levels within sSiNWs can be effectively tuned by varying key design parameters, including nanowire width, length, and pad geometry, increasing around 3% of the stress in the nanowire region.