Phase formation of cubic silicon carbide from reactive silicon–carbon multilayers

Silicon carbide layers were fabricated using self-propagating high-temperature synthesis of binary silicon-carbon based reactive multilayers. The silicon and carbon bilayers were fabricated with two different bilayer thicknesses. They are deposited by magnetron sputtering in an alternating layer system with a total thickness of 1 μm. The entire system is annealed by rapid thermal annealing at different temperatures ranging from 500 to 1100 °C. From XRD analysis we could find that the formation of the silicon carbide phase was initiated from 700 °C. With increasing bilayer thickness the silicon carbide phase formation was partially suppressed by the silicon recrystallization due to resulting lower carbon diffusion into silicon. The transformation process proceeds in a four-step process: densification/recrystallization, interdiffusion, nucleation and transformation. From this, it was noted that when compared to low bilayer thickness samples, the formation of the silicon carbide phase is delayed with increasing bilayer thickness and needs higher reaction initiation temperatures. Graphical abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.].