Study of the deposition of nanopillar-patterned 4H-SiC by molecular dynamics simulation

4H-SiC film growth is a key technology in device manufacturing, but the understanding of the substrate surface pattern on the deposition process of the 4H-SiC film at the atomic scale is still very poor. In this paper, the effect of nanopillar-patterned 4H-SiC substrate on the quality of the film is investigated by a series of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, and the crystal structure, dislocation distribution, surface morphology, roughness, internal stress and density of the deposited film are analyzed at different growth temperatures. The results show that the substrate surface containing nanopillar pattern have lower dislocation density than that without pattern. The surface morphology and roughness of the deposited film are more sensitive to the growth temperature. The average mean atomic stress of the film is compressive and the value exhibits oscillatory behavior as the deposited atoms increase. The deposited film with nanopillar pattern has higher density compared to the one without pattern, resulting in lower volume fraction of defects in the film. The study of this work may provide a better understanding of film deposition at the nanoscale and the effect of substrate surface pattern on the deposited film.