Formation of crystalline heteroepitaxial SiC films on Si by carbonization of polyimide Langmuir-Blodgett films

High-quality crystalline nano-thin SiC films on Si substrates were prepared by carbonization of polyimide (PI) Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) films. The obtained films were characterized by Fourier transform-infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis, Raman spectroscopy, transmission electon microscopy (TEM), transmission electron diffraction (TED), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). We demonstrated that the carbonization of a PI film on a Si substrate at 1000 °C leads to the formation of a carbon film and SiC nanocrystals on the Si substrate. It was found that five planes in the 3C-SiC(111) film are aligned with four Si(111) planes. As a result of repeated annealing of PI films containing 121 layers at 1200 °C crystalline SiC films were formed on the Si substrate. It was shown that the SiC films (35 nm) grown on Si(111) at 1200 °C have a mainly cubic 3C-SiC structure with small amount of hexagonal polytypes. Only 3C-SiC films (30 nm) were formed on the Si(100) substrate at the same temperature. It was shown that the SiC films (30-35 nm) can cover the voids with size up to 10 µm in the Si substrate. The current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of the n-Si/n-SiC heterostructure were obtained by conductive atomic force microscopy.