ELECTRICAL CHARACTERIZATION OF SIC FOR HIGH-TEMPERATURE THERMAL-SENSOR APPLICATIONS

The chemical and physical characteristics of silicon carbide (SiC) films make them increasingly interesting for sensors and devices operating at high temperature, high pressure and/or in aggressive environments. Concerning thermal sensors, for instance, it is well known that in many cases they have to work in perturbed environments where temperature and pressure are not independent constraints. As a consequence, it is necessary to know independently the sensitivity of a given sensor to both of them in order to design a specific application. This is done in this work for cubic beta-SiC. Investigating both the temperature and hydrostatic pressure dependence of the transport properties in a series of thin films deposited on [100] Si substrates, we find that the hydrostatic pressure dependence is negligibly small (a few ppm bar(-1)) with respect to the temperature sensitivity (10(3) ppm degrees C-1).