Silicon Carbide Structures

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Background Silicon Carbide (SiC) is an ideal material for the microelectronics industry. The chemical inertness, stability at high temperatures, and wide bandgap of SiC based electronic components endows it with a number of performance advantages over standard silicon based electronics. The high dielectric breakdown strength and high temperature stability of SiC makes it stand out in power applications. One of the impediments to the wider use of SiC in the microelectronics industry is that SiC components currently require an entirely different fabrication line. Manufacturing SiC components currently requires a wet etching process that can degrade performance of advanced digital circuits and requires chemically resistant masks. New production plant development would require billions of dollars in new investment. The cost issue would best be resolved by developing a process that can utilize the current silicon wafer production lines without creating contamination issues. Technology UMass Lowell Professors Joel Therrien and Daniel Schmidt have developed a method of forming patterned ceramic structures of silicon carbide film by using a pre-ceramic polymer that is easy to work with and can be cured to form SiC. This process is simple and uses existing fabrication lines. This is an enabling technology that allows the fabrication of SiC devices at roughly the same cost as silicon devices, allowing the microelectronic industry to capture the advantages of SiC. Advantages Cost Effective Does not require separate or extra production lines Lower operational costs No need to construct isolated processing facilities to avoid contamination of silicon process lines Material Properties Increased radiation hardening Higher temperature operation, nearly 3 times compared to silicon Higher Solar Efficiency, nearly 2 times the existing technology Promising optical properties in the mid infrared band which could potentially serve as a waveguide in that frequency range. Market Potential Electronic devices based on wide bandgap semiconductors are set to grow by 30% or more per year through 2012. With rapid breakthroughs, the wide bandgap electronics market could advance to more than $300 million by 2012, as manufacturing costs fall and the products can compete against silicon devices in power supply applications [1].