SIC Wafer Guide

There are many high-tech companies offers complete SIC wafer substrate production lines that can integrate crystal growth, crystal processing, wafer processing, polishing, cleaning and inspection processes integrated into the production lines, making the whole production process more efficient in its applications.

4H & 6H SIC Wafers

Today, many suppliers offer commercial 4H and 6H SIC wafers with semi insulation and conductivity in on-axis or off-axis options. The available sizes of ordinary suppliers range from five plus five millimeter, ten plus ten millimeter 2, two inches, three inches, four inches and six inches. This range field breaks through certain key technologies such as defect suppression, seed crystal processing and rapid growth. They can promote basic research and development projects that are related to silicon carbide epitaxy substances and devices.

Industrial Usages

In the field of semiconductor industry, epitaxy refers to a type of crystal growth or material deposition by which new crystalline layers are formed with a well defined orientation with respect to the crystalline substrate as it is. It often refers to as homo epitaxy for professional term usages. Otherwise, the epitaxial layer will be composed of a different compound; this is referred to as hetero epitaxy. This new layers formed are called the epitaxial film or epitaxial layer. The relative orientation of the epitaxial layer to the crystalline substrate is thus defined in terms of the orientation of the crystal lattice of each material and substance. In the case of epitaxial growth of a planar film atop a substrate wafer, the epitaxial film's lattice is going to have a specific orientation which is relative to the substrate wafer's crystalline lattice, such as the 001 Miller index of the film aligning with the 001 index of the substrate.

Epitaxy and SCI Wafers

There are several different types of epitaxy types in the SCI wafer industry, the present article will mention five of them for a simple illustration here. The first one is the homo epitaxy, which is a kind of epitaxy substrate which is performed with only one material, in which a crystalline film is grown on a substrate or film of the same material unit. This technology is adopted to grow a film which is more pure than the substrate and to fabricate layers which have different doping levels. In some academic literature, homo epitaxy, or homoepitaxy, is often abbreviated to homoepi for short.

The second is the well known homotopotaxy that are commonly applied on the SIC wafer. This is a industrial process which is similar to homoepitaxy, except that the thin film growth is not limited to two dimensional growth only. Here the substrate is the thin film material. After this one, here comes the third type, which is named heteroepitaxy. Heteroepitaxy is a subtype of epitaxy substrate which is performed with materials that are different from each other. In the case of heteroepitaxy applied in the SCI wafers, a crystalline film grows on a crystalline substrate or film of a different material, and this technology is often utilized to grow crystalline films of materials for which crystals cannot otherwise be gained and to fabricate integrated crystalline layers of different materials. Industrial instances include silicon on sapphire, gallium nitride on sapphire, aluminum gallium indium phosphide on gallium arsenide or diamond or iridium, and graphene on hexagonal boron nitride.

Some Extreme Cases

Beside these three cases mentioned above, it is the heterotopotaxy, which is a process similar to heteroepitaxy, except the fact that thin film growth is not limited to two dimensional growth, and the substrate is similar only in structure to the thin film material substance. Eventually, the fifth one of this list is the pendeo-epitaxy, which is a process often used in the SIC wafer production in which the heteroepitaxial film is growing vertically and laterally at the same time as the development of wafers are in process. In 2D crystal heterostructure case, the graphene nanoribbons is embedded in hexagonal boron nitride, which gives an example of pendeo-epitaxy case. Most of the SIC wafers are used in the semiconductor application and the physical essences of the heterotopotaxy and pendeo-epitaxy are of the higher level of usages of the epitaxial applications, so that the values are elevated to an extent of high level of exposure.

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