Since the discovery of M41S materials family in 1992, some special features like aligned pores perpendicularly to the substrate surface and long range order, have been looked for with great interest for many applications of these kind of nanomaterials. The growth of thin films displaying meso- and nano-porous structures have attracted the attention of many research groups in the last decade and, with that aim several techniques such as: MBE, CVD, AFM, ion beam lithography, etc., have been used. On the other hand, a lot of down-top techniques, particularly those in which, self-assembly processes play a relevant role in the growth mechanisms of that nanostructures have been reported. Among them, electrochemical techniques constitute one of the most used to fabricate highly ordered nanostructures to be used as templates for replicating other nanostructured materials and for growing functionalized material arrays. In this paper, a brief overview on the nanofabrication techniques is done mainly of those related with the nanowires and, in general, 1D nanostructures fabrication. In addition, we show some results on ordered and disordered nanoporous anodic alumina membranes (AAM) and anodic titania membranes (ATM), respectively. Besides some functionalized systems based on these membranes used as templates are presented such as, magnetic nanowire arrays, biosensors, and carbon nanotubes. The potentiality of these systems for applications on diverse field, such as, nanoelectronic, magneto-optic, biotechnology and optoelectronic is demonstrated. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.