Effect of electronic doping on the plasticity of homoepitaxial 4H-SiC single crystals

Abstract

Instrumented micro-indentations have been performed at room temperature on 4H-SiC homoepitaxial single crystals with different doping. For these experiments, it appears that the pop-in event occurs at the same level of load for intrinsic and n-type SiC and at a higher load level for p-type. Correlation of the pop-in event with dislocation nucleation indicates that doping acts on dislocation nucleation and that p-type doping plays a hardening role on the plastic behaviour of 4H-SiC. This result is confirmed by the conventional measurement of imprint size using scanning electron microscopy. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd 2011.