TaC-coated graphite prepared via a wet ceramic process: Application to CVD susceptors for epitaxial growth of wide-bandgap semiconductors

A novel sintered tantalum carbide coating (SinTaC) prepared via a wet ceramic process is proposed as an approach to reducing the production cost and improving the crystal quality of bulk-grown crystals and epitaxially grown films of wide-bandgap semiconductors. Here, we verify the applicability of the SinTaC components as susceptors for chemical vapor deposition (CVD)-SiC and metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD)-GaN epitaxial growth in terms of impurity incorporation from the SinTaC layers and also clarify the surface-roughness controllability of SinTaC layers and its advantage in CVD applications. The residual impurity elements in the SinTaC layers were confirmed to not severely incorporate into the CVD-SiC and MOCVD-GaN epilayers grown using the SinTaC susceptors. The quality of the epilayers was also confirmed to be equivalent to that of epilayers grown using conventional susceptors. Furthermore, the surface roughness of the SinTaC components was controllable over a wide range of average roughness (0.4 ≤ Ra ≤ 5 μm) and maximum height roughness (3 ≤ Rz ≤ 36 μm) through simple additional surface treatment procedures, and the surface-roughened SinTaC susceptor fabricated using these procedures was predicted to effectively reduce thermal stress on epi-wafers. These results confirm that SinTaC susceptors are applicable to epitaxial growth processes and are advantageous over conventional susceptor materials for reducing the epi-cost and improving the quality of epi-wafers.