Silicon Carbide: The Future of Power Electronics

Posted 2024-02-22 13:12:32

While bulk SiC crystals can be grown by physical vapor transport, this technique is expensive and limited by available wafer sizes. A more scalable and economical approach is chemical vapor deposition (CVD), which involves reacting precursor gases to grow epitaxial SiC films on silicon carbide wafers. However, depositing high-quality, defect-free SiC films via CVD is challenging due to mismatches in crystal structures and lattice constants between SiC and the common Si substrate materials.

Over the past few decades, researchers have fine-tuned the CVD Silicon Carbide process parameters such as precursor gases, growth temperature, pressure, and carrier gases to minimize defects at the SiC/substrate interface. Moreover, techniques like pre-growth annealing and in-situ substrate cleaning have been introduced to prepare atomically flat and defect-free substrate surfaces. These advancements have led to significant improvements in SiC epitaxial layer quality, enabling the high-volume production of SiC devices via the more economical CVD route.

Silicon carbide is anticipated to gradually replace silicon in many commercial high-voltage and high-power applications over the next decade. Continued material and device advancements could see SiC technology spreading to new domains like data center power supplies, flexible AC transmission systems, and solid-state transformers. If key challenges are addressed, SiC promises to become a ubiquitous semiconductor facilitating the transition to more energy-efficient power networks of tomorrow. Undoubtedly, silicon carbide is poised to revolutionize power electronics.

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