Chemical Mechanical Polishing of Silicon Carbide

The High Temperature Integrated Electronics and Sensors (HTIES) team at the NASA Lewis Research Center is developing silicon carbide (SiC) as an enabling electronic technology for many aerospace applications. The Lewis team is focusing on the chemical vapor deposition of the thin, single-crystal SiC films from which devices are fabricated. These films, which are deposited (i.e., epitaxially "grown") on commercial wafers, must consist of a single crystal with very few structural defects so that the derived devices perform satisfactorily and reliably. Working in collaboration (NASA grant) with Professor Pirouz of Case Western Reserve University, we developed a chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP) technique for removing the subsurface polishing damage prior to epitaxial growth of the single-crystal SiC films.