Over the past few years, the interest for the nano-sized C-based materials has received a growing interest, due to peculiar properties that may lead to several applications in electronic devices and sensors. Furthermore, recently, it was shown that carbon-based hard materials, such as diamond-like carbon and carbon nitride thin films, can be used as protective coatings, due to high wear resistance, low friction and high elasticity combined with high hardness [1, 2], as dielectrics, due to high resistivity and breakdown fields in metal–insulator–semiconductor (MIS) devices [3] and for display applications, since the incorporation of nitrogen was shown to improve the field emission from amorphous carbon (aC)[4]. The C–N thin film system, obtained by magnetron sputtering, has been observed mainly in the amorphous phase or in a fullerene-like structure, depending on the growth parameters (ie temperature and deposition rate).In the present work we report the growth of a new kind of C nanostructures, by radio-frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering technique, C deposition is performed using a graphite cathode as material source, on a Si (100) substrate patterned with SiO2 stripes, 90 nm thick and about 1 μm wide. The use of such kind of substrate allows to observe