The phenomenon of low initial growth rates in atomic layer deposition (ALD) of various oxides on HFtreated (thus H-terminated) Si(001) substrates, which is termed the incubation effect or incubation period, can be effectively avoided by use of OH-terminated Si(001) substrates. Two ways of preparing OH-terminated Si(001) were devised in this work: one from atomically clean Si(001) and the other from H-terminated Si(001). The effect of reducing the incubation period was confirmed in the ALD process of aluminum oxide (Al 2 O 3 ) thin films in which trimethylaluminum and water were used as sources of aluminum and oxygen, respectively. The use of OH-terminated Si(001) substrates has another beneficial effect of producing thin films with very smooth surface morphology. We propose the use of OH-terminated Si(001) substrates for growing thin films of many other metal oxides that have shown the incubation period on H-terminated Si(001) substrates.

A self-catalytic method to selectively grow ZnO nanoneedles is demonstrated by simply combining a conventional micro-contact printing (mu-CP) and two-step metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) techniques. Self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of octadecyltrichlorosilane (OTS) were patterned on Si substrates by mu-CP. The patterned structures of the ZnO nanoneedles were realized on the SAMs-patterned Si substrates by two-step MOCVD at high temperature of 600 degrees C via the initial preparation of a thin ZnO seed layer with retaining the patterned morphology at low temperature of 170 degrees C. This combined method of mu-CP and self-catalytic two-step MOCVD should be applicable to fabricate the patterned alignments of metal oxide nanostructures.