Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Journal
of Electronic
Materials, Vol.
28, No.
3, 1999
Horizontal
Cold-Wall
CVD
Reactor
INTRODUCTION
Silicon carbide (SiC) is a wide bandgap semiconductor with a high potential to be used for diodes and
discrete power devices similar to Si-isolated gate
bipolar transistors (IGBTs), particulary in converter
systems. There is a strong advantage for SiC electronics in applications for high temperature and high
frequency devices. In SiC, the on-state and switching
losses are drastically reduced. The decreased on-state
losses result from a lower on-resistance of SiC devices, because the allowed doping level needed for a
certain blocking voltage is higher, due to the critical
electrical field in SiC, which is about one order of
magnitude higher than in Si devices.
Low switching losses are a characteristic of unipolar devices (Schottky-diodes and field effect transistors [FETs]). Using SiC, these properties can be extended to very high voltages (> 2000 V). Electrical
power systems based on SiC devices lead to a clear
reduction of the cooling requirements. Moreover, the
unipolar SiC devices yield improved switching speed.
Therefore, SiC devices can be operated at higher
frequencies, which offers the possibility to use smaller
passive components.
This means, that very compact, light and efficient
electrical power distribution units can be built for all
(Received August 4, 1998; accepted November 6, 1998)
176
Fig. 1. Cross section of the modified quartz liner tube. The dashed line
marks the shape of the standard liner.
single wafer horizontal cold-wall CVD system in conjunction with the feature of an inductively heated
rotating susceptor.
EXPERIMENTAL
Based on a commercial CVD system,4 customer
specific modifications have been made to overcome
strong reactant depletion at the quartz walls of the
inner quartz liner tube. Due to an excessive heat
radiation of the 108 mm diameter disk-like susceptor,
the ceiling of the quartz tube reaches temperatures
about 1000C, which leads to an undesired deposition
of silicon at the tube ceiling during SiC growth. With
increasing thickness even more energy is absorbed by
the film and finally the main deposition takes place at
the upper reactor wall. Choosing an appropriate liner
tube profile the co-deposition at the ceiling can be
suppressed totally for typical growth temperatures
between 1400 and 1500C, as can be seen in Fig. 1.
This design appears to be a good compromise between
maximizing the distance between susceptor and tube
walls and the ability to maintain a laminar gas flow
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