Nature of interfacial defects and their roles in strain relaxation at highly lattice mismatched 3C-SiC/Si (001) interface

Abstract

Misfit defects in a 3C-SiC/Si (001) interface were investigated using a 200 kV high-resolution electron microscope with a point resolution of 0.194 nm. The [110] high-resolution electron microscopic images that do not directly reflect the crystal structure were transformed into the structure map through image deconvolution. Based on this analysis, four types of misfit dislocations at the 3C-SiC/Si (001) interface were determined. In turn, the strain relaxation mechanism was clarified through the generation of grow-in perfect misfit dislocations (including 90° Lomer dislocations and 60° shuffle dislocations) and 90° partial dislocations associated with stacking faults.

Core element effects on dislocation nucleation in 3C–SiC: Reaction pathway analysis

“…Besides, there are two possible kinds of stacking faults involved in the crystal structure of 3C-SiC, respectively originated from Frank dislocation and Shockley partial dislocation. Here, only the Shockley partial dislocations are supposed to nucleate from the interface of 3C-SiC/Si(0 0 1) [4]. Since the stacking fault energy of 3C-SiC is very low, only the leading partial dislocations have been considered.…”

“…The perfect dislocation characterized by a Burgers vector of 1/ 2h1 1 0i usually dissociates into two Shockley partial dislocations located in the glide-set of the {1 1 1} plane separated by a stacking fault due to the extreme low stacking fault energy of SiC [3][4][5][6]. As a binary compound semiconductor, the core of partial dislocation in SiC is terminated by only one element, either Si or C, i.e., Si-core or C-core [7].…”

Restoring defect structures in 3C-SiC/Si (001) from spherical aberration-corrected high-resolution transmission electron microscope images by means of deconvolution processing

“…A number of defects existing in semiconducting and superconducting compounds were studied including the dislocations, stacking faults and twin boundaries, and the atomic configurations were restored from images taken with 200 kV microscopes fitted with the LaB 6 filament or field-emission gun (FEG) (He et al, 1997;Wang et al, 2002Wang et al, , 2004Wang et al, , 2008Wan et al, 2005;Tang et al, 2007;Wen et al, 2009Wen et al, , 2010Li, 2010). Though the images of Si 0.76 Ge 0.24 were taken with a 200 kV FEG microscope of point resolution about 0.2 nm, it was successful to restore the [1 1 0] projected structure with the resolution approximated to the information limit of the microscope by deconvolution processing so that every two Si(Ge) atoms being 0.14 nm distant from each other were resolved individually (Wang et al, 2002(Wang et al, , 2004.…”

“…It is worth reviewing the past studies of different defects in 3C-SiC films grown on the Si (0 0 1) substrate from [1 1 0] images taken with a 200 kV LaB 6 microscope (Tang et al, 2007;Wen et al, 2009). The crystal structure of 3C-SiC is of zinc-blende type with the lattice parameter a SiC = 0.436 nm, and the substrate Si is of diamond type with the lattice parameter a Si = 0.543 nm.…”

“…Though the distance between the Si and C atomic columns in the pair is as small as 0.109 nm, Si and C atomic columns were recognized so that the structure maps of stacking faults, microtwins and misfit dislocations (including Lomer, perfect 60 • , and 90 • partial dislocations) were successfully obtained at atomic level after deconvolution processing. However, the pairs of adjacent Si and C atoms were not resolved individually, and hence the type of perfect 60 • dislocation cannot be determined from the deconvoluted image due to the insufficient microscope information limit (Wen et al, 2009).…”