Emerging SiC Applications beyond Power Electronic Devices

Francesco La Via; Daniel Alquier; Filippo Giannazzo; Tsunenobu Kimoto; Philip Neudeck; Haiyan Ou; Alberto Roncaglia; Stephen E Saddow; Salvatore Tudisco

doi:10.3390/mi14061200

Emerging SiC Applications beyond Power Electronic Devices

Micromachines (Basel). 2023 Jun 6;14(6):1200. doi: 10.3390/mi14061200.

Authors

Francesco La Via¹, Daniel Alquier², Filippo Giannazzo¹, Tsunenobu Kimoto³, Philip Neudeck⁴, Haiyan Ou⁵, Alberto Roncaglia⁶, Stephen E Saddow⁷, Salvatore Tudisco⁸

Affiliations

¹ CNR-IMM, Strada VIII, 5, 95121 Catania, Italy.
² GREMAN, UMR 7347, Université de Tours, CNRS, 37071 Tours, France.
³ Department of Electronic Science and Engineering, Kyoto University, Nishikyo, Kyoto 615-8510, Japan.
⁴ NASA Glenn Research Center, 21000 Brookpark Rd., Cleveland, OH 44135, USA.
⁵ Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Ørsteds Plads, Building 343, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark.
⁶ CNR-IMM, 40129 Bologna, Italy.
⁷ Electrical Engineering Department, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, ENG 030, Tampa, FL 33620, USA.
⁸ INFN-LNS, Via Santa Sofia 62, 95124 Catania, Italy.

Abstract

In recent years, several new applications of SiC (both 4H and 3C polytypes) have been proposed in different papers. In this review, several of these emerging applications have been reported to show the development status, the main problems to be solved and the outlooks for these new devices. The use of SiC for high temperature applications in space, high temperature CMOS, high radiation hard detectors, new optical devices, high frequency MEMS, new devices with integrated 2D materials and biosensors have been extensively reviewed in this paper. The development of these new applications, at least for the 4H-SiC ones, has been favored by the strong improvement in SiC technology and in the material quality and price, due to the increasing market for power devices. However, at the same time, these new applications need the development of new processes and the improvement of material properties (high temperature packages, channel mobility and threshold voltage instability improvement, thick epitaxial layers, low defects, long carrier lifetime, low epitaxial doping). Instead, in the case of 3C-SiC applications, several new projects have developed material processes to obtain more performing MEMS, photonics and biomedical devices. Despite the good performance of these devices and the potential market, the further development of the material and of the specific processes and the lack of several SiC foundries for these applications are limiting further development in these fields.

Keywords: MEMS; biomedical devices; detectors; high temperature devices; photonics; silicon carbide.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

T.K. acknowledges funding by the KAKENHI Grant Number JP21H05003 from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. F.G. acknowledges funding by MUR in the framework of the FlagERA-JTC 2019 project ETMOS. F.L.V. and F.G. acknowledge funding by the European Union (NextGeneration EU), through the MUR-PNRR project SAMOTHRACE (ECS00000022). F.L.V. and A.R. acknowledge funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, SiC Nano for picoGeo, under grant agreement No. 863220. H.O. acknowledges funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 FET Open (SiComb, No.899679). P.N. acknowledges funding from the NASA Science Mission Directorate under the High Operating Temperature Technology (HOTTech) project and from NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate under the Transformational Tools and Technologies Project.