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Materials science

Silicon carbide in contention

Nature volume 430, pages 974–975 (2004)Cite this article

Silicon carbide is a highly desirable material for high-power electronic devices — more desirable even than silicon. And now the problem of producing large, pure wafers of the carbide could be solved.

After a period of intense scientific and industrial development, the semiconductor silicon carbide (SiC) is at last proving capable of outperforming silicon in electronic devices for high-power, high-frequency and high-temperature applications. Its potential as a replacement for silicon has been known since the 1950s, but its late emergence is principally due to the difficulty of growing large SiC crystals of sufficient quality. That difficulty is set to evaporate, thanks to the crystal-growing process introduced by Nakamura et al.1 on page 1009 of this issue.

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Figure 1: The structure of silicon carbide.
Figure 2: The repeated a-face growth process.

References

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  1. CNRS, is in the Department of Physics, Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, Grenoble, 38402, France

    Roland Madar

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  1. Roland Madar
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Madar, R. Silicon carbide in contention. Nature 430, 974–975 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/430974a

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