ABSTRACT
Introduction Amorphous semiconductor alloys are of technological importance for electronic and optoelectronic device application. Amorphous silicon carbide (a-SiC) has been recognized as a semiconductor material with outstanding physical and chemical characteristics. Silicon carbide exhibits a large bandgap, a higher breakdown eld, a higher thermal conductivity, and a higher saturatuin velocity, compared to widely used silicon. On the other hand, amorphous SiC lms have interest related to their high hardness and optical properties and have potential applications as hard, wear resistant coatings, masking material in Si micromaching technology as well as for the formation of optical windows, lters, and color sensors [1, 2]. Recently, plasma-assisted deposition methods such as plasma enhanced CVD [3, 4], electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) [5, 6], the conventional physical vapour deposition methods (magnetron sputtering [7, 8], pulsed laser deposition [9, 10]), ion implantation [11], and molecular beam epitaxy [12] methods have been used to grow SiC lms on Si substrate. However, these methods need high grown temperature, which process defect creation, resulting from high tensile stress generated from a temperature dependent dierence in the thermal expansion coecient between SiC and Si, and involve many pollutions of impurity in the lms such as H element.
