MUSiCAL

Energy efficiency is on every roadmap for the energy transition. In 2020, 27.6% of all energy consumption in France will come from electricity, with a strong upward trend, driven by the development of electric vehicles. The improvement of conversion systems, which allow the management of electricity flows between production, temporary storage and the load (the user) thus represents a considerable challenge. This is the field of power electronics, in which the technological breakthrough brought by wide band gap (WBG) semiconductors, allows electronic systems to be more compact, lighter, faster and much more efficient than silicon-based technologies. Silicon carbide (SiC) is a material of choice for these applications. However, the hexagonal 4H-SiC structure, which is the industrial material, fails to produce MOSFETs with the expected performance. A critical weakness is its switching capability, due to a high density of interface states that severely limits the electron transport in the channel. The cubic form of SiC (3C-SiC) can solve this intrinsic limitation. The MUSiCAL project aims at demonstrating for the first time the obtention of 3C-SiC wafers of quality compatible with the fabrication of a high performance MOS transistor. The challenge lies in reducing the density of stacking faults (SF), electrically active defects in 3C-SiC, to less than 500/cm. Through an original strategy, this project aims to overcome the two main technological barriers: i) the availability of 3C-SiC seeds by heteroepitaxy of 3C-SiC (111) on 4H-SiC coupled with a layer transfer on a host substrate, ii) the development of a TSM (traveling solvent method) solution growth process adapted to obtain an ultimate quality.