Single crystalline silicon carbide thin film exfoliation for power device applications

Silicon carbide (SiC) is a wide-band gap material used in high power and high current electronic applications because of its high thermal conductivity and high breakdown field. Currently SiC is gaining a lot of attention because of the improvements seen in the SiC-MOSFET and SiC applications in the energy industry. It is of great scientific and practical importance to integrate SiC with digital and analog circuits built on Si because it will give more flexibility for device engineers to come up with circuits with low power loss and faster communication between components. One such way of integrating SiC with Si is by transferring thin-films of SiC to Si or other process compatible substrates such as polycrystalline SiC, sapphire and low grade bulk SiC. In this project, hydrogen ion (H+) implantation assisted exfoliation of single crystalline SiC was used transfer 1 to 5 μm thick films to various handle substrates. Optimum conditions for exfoliation and layer transfer were studied extensively. Once the layer transfer was successful surface quality was studied using AFM and chemical etching was used to flatten the post-exfoliation surface. Finally MOS-capacitors and MOSFETs were fabricated on the transferred films and electrical quality of the transferred films was studied.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Voshadhi Pansilu Amarasingh