Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2011
Aluminum nitride (AlN) has been grown on 6H-silicon carbide (SiC) substrates with the non-polar (1120) face using rf plasma-assisted molecular-beam epitaxy (rf-MBE). Reflection high-energy electron diffraction (RHEED) revealed that AlN and 6H-SiC (1120) had an exact epitaxial relationship, i.e., [1120]AlN|[1120]SiC and [0001]AlN∥[0001]SiC. From the result of microscopic Raman scattering spectroscopy, the stacking structure of the AlN epitaxial layer was suggested to be a 2H structure, not a 6H structure. A directly grown AlN layer and layer with AlN low-temperature (LT) buffer layer were investigated based on atomic force microscopy (AFM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD).