Discrimination of dislocations in 4H-SiC by inclination angles of molten-alkali etched pits

Discrimination of dislocations is critical to the statistics of dislocation densities in 4H silicon carbide(4H-SiC),which are routinely used to evaluate the quality of 4H-SiC single crystals and homoepitaxial layers.In this work,we show that the inclination angles of the etch pits of molten-alkali etched 4H-SiC can be adopted to discriminate threading screw dislocations(TSDs),threading edge dislocations(TEDs)and basal plane dislocations(BPDs)in 4H-SiC.In n-type 4H-SiC,the inclination angles of the etch pits of TSDs,TEDs and BPDs in molten-alkali etched 4H-SiC are in the ranges of 27°−35°,8°−15°and 2°−4°,respectively.In semi-insulating 4H-SiC,the inclination angles of the etch pits of TSDs and TEDs are in the ranges of 31°−34°and 21°−24°,respectively.The inclination angles of dislocation-related etch pits are independent of the etching duration,which facilitates the discrimination and statistic of dislocations in 4H-SiC.More significantly,the inclination angle of a threading mixed dislocations(TMDs)is found to consist of characteristic angles of both TEDs and TSDs.This enables to distinguish TMDs from TSDs in 4H-SiC.