Glennan Microsystems Initiative

During the 2001-2002 award period, we performed research on Pt/Ti/bare 6H-SiC and bare 4H-SiC interfaces in order to identify their electronic properties as a function of surface preparation. The overall aim of this work is to optimize the electronic properties of metal contacts to SiC as well as the active SiC material itself as a function of surface preparation and subsequent processing. Initially, this work has involved identifying bare surface, subsurface, and metal induced gap states at the metal-SiC contact and correlating energies and densities of deep levels with Schottky barrier heights. We used low energy electron-excited nanoluminescence (LEEN) spectroscopy, X-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS), and Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) in order to correlate electronic states and energy bands with chemical composition, bonding, and crystal structure. A major development has been the discovery of polytype transformations that occur in 4H-SiC under standard microelectronic process conditions used to fabricate SiC devices. Our results are consistent with the stacking fault generation, defect formation, and consequent degradation of SiC recently reported for state-of-the-art ABB commercial diodes under localized electrical stress. Our results highlight the importance of -optimizing process conditions and material properties - anneal times, temperatures and doping to control such structural changes within epitaxial SiC layers. Thus far, we have established threshold times and temperatures beyond which 4H-SiC exhibits 3C-SiC transformation bands for a subset of dopant concentrations and process conditions. On the basis of this temperature time behavior, we have been able to establish an activation energy of approximately 2.5 eV for polytype transformation and dislocation motion. Work continues to establish the fundamental mechanisms underlying the polytype changes and its dependence on material parameters.