Basal Plane Dislocation Mitigation in SiC Epitaxial Growth by

Communication pubs.acs.org/crystal

Basal Plane Dislocation Mitigation in SiC Epitaxial Growth by Nondestructive Substrate Treatment Haizheng Song* and Tangali S. Sudarshan Department of Electrical Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina 29208, United States ABSTRACT: An optimized molten KOH−NaOH−MgO eutectic mixture is used to pretreat the 8° off-axis 4H-SiC substrate prior to chemical vapor deposition epitaxial growth. Superior to the conventional pure KOH etching method, by way of the eutectic method, the conversion of basal plane dislocation (BPD) to threading edge dislocation in the subsequent epitaxial growth is independent of the etch pit size pregenerated on the substrate. Even with a very mild treatment using the eutectic mixture, which does not generate discriminable etch pits on the substrate, an epilayer with low BPD density