Epitaxial Growth of Silicon Carbide (SiC) on Compliant Substrates by Ion Enhanced MBE

Silicon carbide is a semiconductor ideally suited for high power, frequency, speed and temperature applications. This project proposes a unique ion beam synthesis method of epitaxial silicon carbide on compliant substrates. The technique produces low energy, high current ions to promote surface mobility for high quality epitaxy. This ion synthesis method bypasses the usual thermal pathways, resulting in much lower growth temperature to minimize thermal mismatch problems. Growth on the thin compliant buffer layer may prevent dislocations from forming during growth. The epitaxy process will be followed by in-situ monitoring techniques for close process control. The proposed work is based on our SiC molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) experience. We will investigate the ion synthesis in a modified MBE reactor, study the reaction mechanism, and cary out material characterization. The method can be scaled up to large sizes for cost-effective epiwafer production.