SiC direct bonding using O2 plasma activation is investigated in this work. SiC substrate and n− SiC epitaxy growth layer are activated with an optimized duration of 60s and power of the oxygen ion beam source at 20 W. After O2 plasma activation, both the SiC substrate and n− SiC epitaxy growth layer present a sufficient hydrophilic surface for bonding. The two 4-inch wafers are prebonded at room temperature followed by an annealing process in an atmospheric N2 ambient for 3 h at 300 °C. The scanning results obtained by C-mode scanning acoustic microscopy (C-SAM) shows a high bonding uniformity. The bonding strength of 1473 mJ/m2 is achieved. The bonding mechanisms are investigated through interface analysis by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). Oxygen is found between the two interfaces, which indicates Si–O and C–O are formed at the bonding interface. However, a C-rich area is also detected at the bonding interface, which reveals the formation of C-C bonds in the activated SiC surface layer. These results show the potential of low cost and efficient surface activation method for SiC direct bonding for ultrahigh-voltage devices applications.

In this paper, the rigorous coupled-wave analysis (RCWA) is extended for general multi-layer deformable gratings with arbitrary numbers of layers, surface profiles, layer offsets, and materials. The contribution from the offset between grating layers and/or due to the movement of the deformable grating layer is included in the expansion of the relative permittivity by the Fourier series, enabling the calculations of deformable gratings commonly used in many optical-based displacement sensing devices. The accuracy and efficiency of the extended RCWA are verified by a number of grating models. It is found that the numerical results are in excellent agreement with those from the finite element method, while the RCWA method costs only ∼ 1 / 10 in computation time when compared to its counterpart. Our approach can be used for fast calculation and optimization of multi-layer deformable gratings for optical displacement sensing applications.