Extended study of the step-bunching mechanism during the homoepitaxial growth of SiC

Abstract

We discuss the possible source of surface instabilities (with specific reference to the step bunching phenomena) during the growth of cubic and hexagonal Silicon Carbide polytypes. For this analysis we use: results from super-lattice Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations, atomic force microscope surface analysis and literature data. We show that only hexagonal polytypes with misorientation cut toward the <11–20> direction suffer “intrinsically” the step bunching phenomena (i.e. it is present, independently on the growth conditions) whereas cubic polytypes and hexagonal ones with misorientation cut toward the <10–10> direction do not.