Why does silicon carbide become an important material for the third generation semiconductor?

Silicon carbide has stable chemical properties, high thermal conductivity, low coefficient of thermal expansion, good wear resistance and great hardness. Its Mohs hardness is 9.5. It has excellent thermal conductivity. It is a semiconductor and can resist oxidation at high temperature.

Advantages of silicon carbide devices

Silicon carbide (SIC) is a mature wide band gap semiconductor material. Countries all over the world attach great importance to the research of SiC and invest a lot of human and material resources. The United States, Europe and Japan have not only formulated corresponding research plans at the national level, but also invested a lot of money in the development of silicon carbide semiconductor devices.

Compared with ordinary silicon, silicon carbide components have the following characteristics:

1. High voltage characteristics

2. High frequency characteristics

3. High temperature characteristics

Third generation semiconductor materials

Silicon carbide single crystal material

In the field of wide band gap semiconductor materials, in terms of technical maturity, silicon carbide is the higher of this family of materials and the core of wide band gap semiconductors. SiC material is a group iv-iv semiconductor compound with wide band gap (eg: 3.2eV) and high breakdown electric field (4 × 106v / cm) and high thermal conductivity (4.9w / cm. K). In terms of structure, SiC material belongs to the close arrangement structure of silicon carbon atoms, which can be regarded as the close arrangement of silicon atoms, and carbon atoms occupy their tetrahedral vacancies; It can also be regarded as the dense arrangement of carbon atoms, and silicon occupies the tetrahedral vacancy of carbon. For silicon carbide close packed structure, about 200 crystal forms have been found from different unidirectional close packed modes. At present, 4H and 6h crystal forms are widely used. 4h SiC is especially suitable for the field of microelectronics to prepare high-frequency, high-temperature and high-power devices; 6h SiC is especially suitable for optoelectronic field to realize full-color display.

With the development of SiC technology, its electronic devices and circuits will lay a solid foundation for the system to solve the above challenges. Therefore, the development of SiC materials will directly affect the development of wide band gap technology.