Silicon Carbide -- A Versatile Material for New Sensors and Radiation Detectors

Dear Colleagues,

Silicon Carbide (SiC) is a wide-bandgap semiconductor, long known to have potential applications in high-temperature, high-power, high frequency, and radiation hardness devices. The development of SiC technology over the last few years, since the release of commercial 6H-SiC bulk substrates in 1991 and 4H-SiC substrates in 1994, has been extremely promising, with significant improvements to wafer growth technology, materials processing, electronic devices and, increasingly, sensors and radiation detectors.

The excellent material properties are derived from the high strength of the Si-C bond; SiC exists in a large number of polytypes, built from the same Si-C subunit organized into a variety of stacking sequences. There are over 100 known polytypes, and the majority of R&D activities have concentrated on 3C, 6H and 4H. Of these, the 4H polytype is the most common for electronic devices, due to its overall superior material properties, the suitability for which drives the investment in this area. The bandgap of 4H-SiC is higher at room temperature compared to silicon and this dramatically reduces the number of electron-hole pairs formed from thermal activation across the bandgap and allows high temperature operation of SiC electronic devices, including sensors. The 3C-SiC is more common for MEMs based sensors due to the fact that it may be grown on Si wafers, thus the reducing overall wafer cost compared with a pure SiC technology. Others advantages for all forms of SiC include: High radiation and chemical tolerance, high thermal conductivity, high hardness and Young’s modulus and a high critical electric field. This combination of excellent electronic and mechanical properties offers many possibilities for using SiC as a material for a wide range of sensors, particularly in applications featuring high temperatures or hostile environments (in situ monitoring of combustion processes, uncooled radiation detectors in new generations of spacecraft, etc.).

This Special Issue aim to review the use of SiC as a material for a range of different types of sensor and detectors applications, highlighting material advantages, current status of device processing and providing a critical discussion on the potential applications.

Dr. Salvatore Tudisco
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Silicon Carbide
• radiation hardness
• MEMS
• radiation detectors