Improving mechanical strength and surface uniformity to prepare high quality thinned 4H-SiC epitaxial wafer using Si-vapor etching technology

As a new thinning and surface planarizing process of Silicon Carbide (SiC) wafer, we propose the completely thermal-chemical etching process; Si-vapor etching (Si-VE) technology. In this work, the effects of mechanical strength and surface step-terrace structure by Si-VE are investigated on the 4° off-axis 4H-SiC (0001) Si-face substrates. The indentation hardness of Si-VE surface is superior to the conventional chemo-mechanical polishing (CMP) surface even after epitaxial growth. The transverse strength of thinned Si-VE substrate is also superior to the conventional mechanically ground substrate. The surface step-terrace structures are observed by the low energy electron channeling contrast (LE-ECC) imaging technique. The latent scratch causes bunched step lines (BSLs) with various inhomogeneous step morphologies only on the CMP surface.