The development of a particular etching recipe involving two sequences of a Deep Reactive Ion Etching followed by an isotropic etching step for the realization of 3D stacked arrays of fins and nanowires on bulk silicon is reported. Such a recipe can be used among the new processes and designs developed to control the shape and formation of such 3D structures. Applications in microelectronics (stacked field effect transistors) and microsystems (arrays of MEMS resonators and photonic structures) are foreseen. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.