Repetition of In Situ Cleaning Using Chlorine Trifluoride Gas for Silicon Carbide Epitaxial Reactor

In order to develop a practical in situ cleaning method applicable for a silicon carbide epitaxial reactor, the silicon carbide film formation and the cleaning using chlorine trifluoride gas were repeated three times on the susceptor. The 40-μm-thick silicon carbide film was removed by the optimized condition consisting of the susceptor temperature, the chlorine trifluoride gas concentration and its flow rate of 330◦C, 100% and 50 sccm, respectively, at atmospheric pressure for 120–180 min. The susceptor coating film having a round-shaped morphology had an allowable surface damage after the three repetitions of the film formation and cleaning. © The Author(s) 2015. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse of the work in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. [DOI: 10.1149/2.0051602jss] All rights reserved.