Structural properties of 6H-SiC epilayers grown by two different techniques

In the present work we investigated the structural properties of 6H-SiC homoepitaxial layers utilizing microhardness and X-ray characterization techniques. The growth was performed by chemical vapour deposition (CVD) and liquid phase epitaxy (LPE) under various growth conditions. The depth Knoop hardness profiles represent decreasing curves due to the indentation size effect. With load increasing the curves saturate reaching microhardness values comparable with the known Vickers ones. At about 0.4 μm beneath the layer surfaces the curves show small plateaus which may be attributed to structural inhomogeneity. This is suggested by X-ray diffraction spectra taken from the same samples, which contain additional peaks besides the typical ones for 6H-SiC.