Phase Formation of Cubic Silicon Carbide from Reactive Silicon-Carbon Multilayers

Phase Formation of Cubic Silicon Carbide from Reactive Silicon-Carbon Multilayers<br/>Dwarakesh Sudhahar ¹, Deepshikha Shekhawat ^1*, Joachim Döll ², Jörg Pezoldt ¹*<br/><br/>¹FG Nanotechnologie, Institut für Mikro- und Nanelektronik and Institut für Mikro- und Nanotechnologien MacroNano^â and Institut für Werkstofftechnik, TU Ilmenau, Postfach 100565, 98684 Ilmenau, Germany; [email protected] (D.S.)<br/>²Zentrum für Mikro- und Nanotechnologien, TU Ilmenau, Gustav-Kirchhoff-Straße 7, 98693 Ilmenau, Germany; [email protected] (J.D.)<br/>* Correspondence: [email protected] (D.S.); [email protected] (J.P.)<br/><br/><b>Abstract:</b> The scope of this paper is to produce efficient and low-cost silicon carbide multilayers. The method is formed on self-propagating high-temperature synthesis of binary silicon-carbon based reactive multilayers. In order to do so the silicon carbide is fabricated by means of the magnetron sputtering method. The silicon and carbon bilayers were fabricated with two different bilayer thicknesses. The silicon and carbon are deposited in an alternative layer with a total thickness of 1 μm. The entire system is annealed by rapid thermal analysis at different temperatures starting from 500 C to 1100 C and heating uprate. In order to find the phase formation, morphology, and reaction enthalpy the samples were investigated with XRD, SEM and FTIR. From XRD analysis we could find that the formation of the silicon-carbide phase was initiated from 700 C with increasing bilayer thickness the silicon carbide phase formation was partially suppressed by the silicon recrystallization due to resulting lower carbon diffusion into silicon. The transformation process proceeds in a four-step process. From this, it was noted that when compared to low bilayer thickness samples, the formation of the SiC phase is delayed with increasing bilayer thickness and needs a high temperature. The grain size and morphology of the samples were well studied with SEM analysis and the measured average thickness of the Si and the C layers are 53 and 48 nm, respectively.<br/><br/><b>Keywords:</b> phase transition, reactive materials, reaction enthalpy, X-ray diffraction, differential scanning calorimetry