4.7 Article

Chemical Vapor Deposition of Graphene on Self-Limited SiC Interfacial Layers Formed on Silicon Substrates for Heterojunction Devices

Journal

ACS APPLIED NANO MATERIALS
Volume 5, Issue 12, Pages 17544-17555

Publisher

AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/acsanm.2c03006

Keywords

graphene; 3C-SiC; Si; CVD; PECVD; DFT-MD simulations; heterojunction; I-V characteristic

Funding

  1. National Natural Science Foundation of China
  2. Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
  3. [62025403]
  4. [61974129]
  5. [61721005]
  6. [226-2022-00200]

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This study investigates the conditions and mechanisms for the growth of graphene on cubic-silicon carbide surfaces and finds that graphene nanowalls can be successfully grown on Si and 3C-SiC/Si surfaces using the PECVD technique. Graphene/Si heterostructures grown via PECVD exhibit higher current conduction and are suitable for various electronic and optoelectronic applications.
Direct chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of graphene on any desired substrate is always required to manufacture high-quality heterojunctions with excellent interfacial properties. Herein, the growth of graphene on cubic-silicon carbide (3C-SiC) surfaces using conventional high-temperature direct thermal CVD and plasma-enhanced CVD (PECVD) is explored, which is hardly reported to date. Since 3C-SiC substrates are not available, the controlled self-limited 3C-SiC layers on the Si(100) substrates were grown at different temperatures (900-1200 degrees C) via thermal-CVD technique to obtain virtual 3C-SiC substrates. The direct production of graphene via thermal CVD could not be achieved on such 3C-SiC surfaces. The density functional theory and molecular dynamics simulations confirm that the carbon atom diffusion over the 3C-SiC surface is extremely low, like over the Si surface, which leads to no graphene growth. A similar growth mechanism may be attributed to their similar crystal structure viz diamond cubic for Si and zinc blend for 3C-SiC. However, graphene nanowalls (GNWs) were successfully grown on both Si and 3CSiC/Si surfaces at 700 degrees C via the PECVD technique, where similar surface morphologies were observed because the growth mechanism of GNWs is independent of substrate type. Moreover, I-V characterization was performed for different SiC/Si heterostructures and their corresponding GNWs/SiC/Si heterostructures, respectively. The current conduction improved considerably more for GNW/SiC/Si heterostructures as compared to SiC/Si heterostructures, but the creation of a SiC interfacial layer as well as its quality affected the conductivity of GNWs/SiC/Si heterostructures. The inevitable formation of an interfacial SiC layer during the direct graphene growth via thermal CVD on Si substrates can seriously affect the performance of graphene/Si heterojunction devices. Hence, PECVD growth of graphene is an ideal option to fabricate graphene/Si heterojunction devices with excellent interfacial properties or graphene/3C-SiC/Si heterojunction devices for various electronic/optoelectronic applications such as gas sensors and photovoltaic devices.

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