Role of Cl/Si Ratio in the Low-Temperature Chloro-Carbon Epitaxial Growth of SiC

Abstract

In order to understand the influence of the Cl/Si ratio on the morphology of the low-temperature chloro-carbon epitaxial growth, HCl was added during the SiCl4/CH3Cl growth at 1300°C. Use of higher Cl/Si ratio allowed only modest improvements of the growth rate without morphology degradation, which did not go far beyond what has been achieved previously by optimizing the value of the input C/Si ratio. On the other hand, when the epitaxial growth process operated at too low or too high values of the input C/Si ratio, i.e., outside of the window of good epilayer morphology, any additional increase of the Cl/Si ratio caused improvement of the epilayer morphology. It was established that this improvement was due to a change of the effective C/Si ratio towards its intermediate values, which corresponded to more favorable growth conditions.