Effective Penetration Depths Investigation on Synchrotron X-Ray Topographic Images of Basal Plane Dislocations in 4H-SiC Crystals through Ray-Tracing Simulation
Authors: Cheng Qianyu , Peng Hongyu , Hu Shanshan , Liu Yafei , Chen Zeyu , Raghothamachar Balaji , Dudley Michael 
Published: November 2022

The demand for power electronic devices fabricated from silicon carbide (SiC) has increased rapidly in recent years for a diverse range of existing and emerging applications. The development of device technology highly depends on the quality of substrate and epitaxial material and the number of deleterious defects within, as those are critical factors that impact the device performance and long-term reliability [1, 2]. Therefore, understanding the nature of defects is of great importance for preventing the degradation or premature breakdown of devices. Synchrotron X-ray topography (XRT) is a dominant analytical method for the imaging and characterization of crystallographic defects. For 4° off-axis (0001) 4H-SiC wafers, the grazing-incidence geometry topographic technique is commonly employed to focus on the defect investigation near surface region. In this geometry, a small incidence angles (~1-2°) is used for allowing X-ray to only penetrate the sample with a shallow depth below the surface, therefore, it is essential to establish a procedure to define the effective penetration depth for detailed analysis of dislocation structures and density calculations. In earlier studies, Dudley in 1989 concluded that the observed penetration depths are limited by photoelectric absorption rather than extinction [3]. Ishiji in 2017 estimated the penetration depth based on the photoelectric absorption experienced by the diffracted X-rays [4]. However, only basal plane dislocations (BPDs) with screw segments parallel to the off-cut [11-20]-direction were evaluated in that study, which is insufficient for evaluating other types of BPDs. Therefore, a universal method to determine the effective penetration depth for all dislocation types would be of more practical importance.

In this study, a procedure to define this effective penetration depth is demonstrated by investigating physical vapor transport (PVT) grown 4° off-axis 4H-SiC crystals through preforming systematic analysis of topographic and ray-tracing simulated contrast of BPDs with different Burgers vector and line direction combinations. The topographic images are recorded through synchrotron monochromatic beam in grazing incidence geometry. The simulation model is based on the principle of orientation contrast mechanism [5, 6] and developed by considering both the effects of surface relaxation [7] and X-ray absorption [8, 9] for evaluating the contributed factors of dislocation contrast formation. Analysis of the results indicates the observable dislocation contrast depends on the effective misorientation associated with the dislocation modulated by the photoelectric absorption effect. The dislocations with larger effective misorientation are associated with longer projected lengths and corresponding deeper effective penetration depths. A more simplified factor based on an approximate expression for the misorientation is also introduced in this study as an alternative to the full ray-tracing simulation approach. The effective penetration depth determination method presented in this study enables three-dimensional dislocation configuration analysis and accurate density calculations.

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