We fabricated contact electrodes in Si for nanoelectronic device fabrication using 40 keV As ion implantation. Complete amorphization of the Si surface with contact electrodes using 400 eV Ar ion irradiation at room temperature followed by annealing at 700 degreesC produced Si surface with negligible SiC crystallites suitable for ultrahigh vacuum scanning tunneling microscope nanolithography. We could locate the implanted and unimplanted regions on Si and fabricate Si dangling bond wires between two contact electrodes, which is the first step for the fabrication of nanoelectronic devices in Si using UHV STM nanolithography. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.