Ultra Low-cost SiC Substrate (ULSiC) (ART/401CP)

SiC devices are regarded as excellent power device candidates for applications in the field of automative, energy, etc. The SiC market size is forecasted to reach 10.4 billion by 2029. The project intends to develop the low-cost SiC substrate technology by integrating a high-quality SiC thin film and a low-cost SiC handle wafer. A technical platform consisting key process including ion implantation, wafer bonding, and annealing will be established. Then process mentioned above will be integrated and optimized to obtain a high-quality bonded substrate. Adopting co-implantation method, the efficiency of layer splitting could be enhanced. Surface activated bonding method would achieve conductive wafer bonding. Pretreatment involving polishing and cleaning before bonding would help optimize bonding result. A two-step annealing process will be performed after wafer bonding. Finally, a bonded substrate will be demonstrated. Characterization methods such as SEM, TEM, AFM would be applied to verify experimental results. Application of the low-cost, high-quality SiC bonded substrates to SiC device will be demonstrated on 1200 V Schottky barrier diodes, and benchmarking performance with commercial diodes. The cost of a SiC bonded substrate could be ~50% lower than the conventional SiC substrate. This technology will promote SiC devices for upgrading industrial applications.