Grown-in and Radiation-induced Defects in 4H-SiC

Abstract

AbstractSiC is a material that seems ideal for high-power, high frequency and high temperature electronic devices. It does not suffer from large reverse recovery inefficiencies typical for silicon when switching. In contrast to silicon, SiC is however difficult to dope by diffusion, and instead ion-implantation is used to achieve selective area doping. The drawback of this technique is that irradiating the crystal with dopant atoms creates a great deal of lattice damage including vacancies, interstitials, antisites and impurity-radiation defect complexes. Although many of the point defects can be eliminated through thermal annealing, some however, e.g. the photoluminescence (PL) DI and DLTS Z1/Z2 centers in ·4H-SiC, are stable to high temperatures. In this polytype, DI and the related alphabet lines are the most prominent PL signals. The latter can be seen directly after low energy irradiation while DI usually dominates the PL spectrum of implanted and irradiated SiC after annealing. Not only implantation but also rapid growth of SiC by CVD methods leads to a deterioration in quality with an increase in electrically active grown in defects. Among these, the Z1/Z2 defects are dominant in n-type 4H-SiC, as well as material that has been exposed to radiation. We use first principles density functional calculations to investigate defect models for the above mentioned defects in 4H-SiC and relate their electrical and optical activity to experiments.