Technical Insight
A shortcut to SiC-diamond heterostructures (Research Review)
A shortcut to SiCdiamond heterostructures To date there has been only limited success in producing n-type regions in diamond or p-type regions in SiC, while n-type doping of SiC by nitrogen implantation and p-type doping of diamond with boron are well-established processes. One way around this problem is to combine these two materials in order to exploit this complementary behavior for fabricating p-n heterojunctions or n-type regions in insulating diamond, and preliminary experiments have shown that ion-beam synthesis could be a suitable way to produce SiCdiamond heterostructures in microscopic regions. Writing in Applied Physics Letters 77(2) p226, V Heera et al. at Forschungszentrum Rossendorf, Dresden report two ways of achieving these heterostructures: diamond formation by high-dose carbon implantation in crystalline SiC, and SiC formation by high-dose silicon implantation in natural diamond. Implantation is carried out above 700 C in order to avoid implantation damage, and epitaxial nanometer-scale spherical diamond or plate-like SiC precipitates are formed inside the host crystals.
