Over the last 20 years the hot wire chemical vapor deposition (HWCVD) technique is being explored as an effective alternative to the conventional plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) for silicon based thin film devices and is claimed to have various advantages. An important point to be appreciated is the mixed nature of the HWCVD process. On one hand it offers all the benefits of being a chemical vapor process and on the other it has the flavor of physical vapor deposition due to the generation of precursors at a line/plane like source (wire array) far away from the substrate albeit with subsequent transport accompanied by secondary gas phase reactions. The possible control over the secondary gas phase reactions gives a unique feature to the HWCVD process. Apart from employing HWCVD for the preparation of a-Si:H and pc-Si:H with high deposition rates we have extended the applicability of the HWCVD to the synthesis of piezoresistive microcrystalline silicon, diffusion barriers of a-SiC:H, silicon nanowires, boron carbide for thermal neutron detectors, stress free a-SiN:H thin films for MEMS devices and metal nano-templates for semiconductor nanowire synthesis. We also established the applicability of HWCVD in surface nano-engineering to incorporate different functionalities (without actually depositing any film) i.e. nano-engineering or nano-modification of the surface to avoid electromigration on low-k dielectric layers and reduce surface defects in crystalline silicon and also bring about nano-crystallization of metallic thin films. Hence I would like to coin a more general nomenclature for this technique and refer to it as hot wire chemical vapor process (HWCVP). This paper discusses the results and outcomes of some of the case studies that we have carried out employing the HWCVP. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.