Monte Carlo study of the high temperature hydrogen cleaning process of 6H-silicon carbide for subsequent growth of nano scale metal oxide films

Abstract

Surface preparation of silicon carbide (SiC) is critical to producing silicon carbide based wide bandgap semiconductor for electronic devices operating in high temperatures and/or harsh environments. In this research we study the impact of cleaning time and cleaning temperature on reflection high energy electron diffraction-based structural and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy based stoichiometric performance indicators. We used a neural network assisted Monte Carlo analysis of the high temperature hydrogen etching procedure. We observed that the optimum cleaning time and temperature ranges for structural and stoichiometric analyses corroborate generally. The detailed examination of the stoichiometric analysis points to narrow parameter ranges where both optimum surface chemistry and (√3 × √3) R30° reconstruction of the structure of the surface can be achieved. A range of 1,400–1,500°C cleaning temperature for a time period of 14–20 minutes was found to consistently result in (√3 × √3) R30° reconstruction with an optimum oxygen content.