Electrical Nanocharacterization of Epitaxial Graphene/Silicon Carbide Schottky Contacts

Abstract

Epitaxial graphene fabricated by thermal decomposition of the Si-face of silicon carbide (SiC) forms a defined interface to the SiC substrate. As-grown monolayer graphene with buffer layer establishes an ohmic interface even to low-doped (e. g. [N] ≈ 1015cm-3) SiC, and a specific contact resistance as low as ρC= 5.9×10-6Ωcm2can be achieved on highly n-doped SiC layers. After hydrogen intercalation of monolayer graphene, the so-called quasi-freestanding graphene forms a Schottky contact to n-type SiC with a Schottky barrier height of 1.5 eV as determined fromC-Vanalysis and core level photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). This value, however, strongly deviates from the respective value of less than 1 eV determined from I-V measurements. It was found from conductive atomic force microscopy (C-AFM) that the Schottky barrier is locally lowered on other crystal facets located at substrate step edges. For very small Schottky contacts, the barrier height extracted fromI-Vcurves approaches the value of 1.5 eV fromC-Vand XPS.