A New Approach for the Growth of High Resistivity Silicon Carbide

This Phase I program is aimed at demonstrating a novel SiC source material synthesis technique that will be used to grow high resistivity SiC. In this effort, we will demonstrate that the proposed source material synthesis technique will produce SiCstarting material that is far superior to presently used material in terms of purity and process time, and that the high purity source material can be synthesized with high yield, and hence, low cost. The synthesized source material is expected to producehigh resistivity 4H-SiC boules > 10^5 ohm-cm. In Phase I, we expect to deliver a SiC boule of approximately 50mm diameter. In Phase II, further refinements will be made to the source synthesis process, and we will demonstrate the production ofcommercially viable high resistivity 4H-SiC wafers, >50mm in diameter, with resistivity >10^5 ohm-cm and of good polytype homogeneity grown using the synthesized source material.With the proposed approach, three specific advantages are anticipated: (a) thehigh yield of the synthesis process is expected to result in low cost of the pure source material, (b) the high purity source material will produce boules whose characteristics are uniform over its volume (<10% variation in resistivity), (c) high waferyield and reduced cost of high resistivity SiC wafers, which will stimulate widespread commercialization of the material for microwave and RF system applications.