Characterizations of annealed ion implanted silicon carbide materials and devices

Silicon carbide (SiC) materials have unique materials properties, such as high good thermal conductivity high saturated velocity and high breakdown field, which make them attractive many applications in the areas of high temperature, high frequency and high power devices. Despite the superior materials properties of SiC as listed above, it is difficult to fabricate SiC devices with conventional silicon CMOS technology. One of the difficulties is to introduce dopants into SiC. Unlike silicon, the introduction of dopants into SiC was mainly done with ion implantation. The lattice damage and strain caused by ion implantation needs to be removed by high temperature annealing. Therefore, a major part of this thesis was to design and realize a high temperature annealing furnace to remove the lattice damage and strain. Annealed samples were analyzed with high resolution X-Ray diffraction and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy. Our results suggest that high temperature thermal annealing can remove the strain and damage caused by ion implantation.; Recent advances in impurity doped silicon terahertz emitters motivated us to study the possibility of using nitrogen doped 4H-SiC devices as terahertz emitters. Due to the two non-equivalent donor sites of nitrogen in 4H-SiC, for the first time, strong terahertz emission was observed up to temperatures of 150K. This result suggests that it may be possible to use SiC terahertz emitters for high temperature, high power portable applications.