c © World Scientic Publishing Company SiC SURFACE RECONSTRUCTION: RELEVANCY OF ATOMIC STRUCTURE FOR GROWTH TECHNOLOGY

Growth of SiC wafer material, of heterostructures with alternating SiC crystal modications (polytypes), and of oxide layers on SiC are of importance for potential electronic device applications. By investigation of hexagonal SiC surfaces the importance of atomic surface structure for control of the respective growth processes involved is elucidated. Dierent reconstruction phases prepared by ex situ hydrogen treatment or by Si deposition and annealing in vacuum were analyzed using scanning tunnel-ing microscopy (STM), Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) and low-energy electron diraction (LEED) crystallography. The extremely ecient dangling bond saturation of the SiC(0001)-(33) phase allows step flow growth for monocrystalline homoepitaxial layers. A switch to cubic layer stacking can be induced on hexagonal SiC(0001) samples when a ( p 3p3)R30 phase is prepared. This might serve as seed for polytype heterostructures. Finally, we succeeded in preparing an epitaxially well matching silicon oxide monolayer with ( p 3p3)R30 periodicity on both SiC(0001) and SiC(0001). This initial layer promises to facilitate low defect density oxide lms for MOS devices. 1