In recent years, several new applications of SiC (both 4H and 3C polytypes) have been proposed in different papers. In this review, several of these emerging applications have been reported to show the development status, the main problems to be solved and the outlooks for these new devices. The use of SiC for high temperature applications in space, high temperature CMOS, high radiation hard detectors, new optical devices, high frequency MEMS, new devices with integrated 2D materials and biosensors have been extensively reviewed in this paper. The development of these new applications, at least for the 4H-SiC ones, has been favored by the strong improvement in SiC technology and in the material quality and price, due to the increasing market for power devices. However, at the same time, these new applications need the development of new processes and the improvement of material properties (high temperature packages, channel mobility and threshold voltage instability improvement, thick epitaxial layers, low defects, long carrier lifetime, low epitaxial doping). Instead, in the case of 3C-SiC applications, several new projects have developed material processes to obtain more performing MEMS, photonics and biomedical devices. Despite the good performance of these devices and the potential market, the further development of the material and of the specific processes and the lack of several SiC foundries for these applications are limiting further development in these fields.

In this paper, we demonstrate the high electrical activity of extended defects found in 3C–SiC heteroepitaxially grown layer on (100) silicon substrates. Cross-sectional scanning transmission electron microscopy analysis was performed to reveal the defects while scanning spreading resistance microscopy aimed to study their electrical behavior. Using this technique, complete layer resistance cartography was done. The electrical activity of the extended defects in 3C–SiC was clearly evidenced. Furthermore, the defect activity was estimated to be higher than that of heavily nitrogen doped (5×1018 cm−3) 3C–SiC layer.

Using vertically grown hydrothermal ZnO nanowires, we demonstrate the assembly of fully functional piezoelectric energy harvesters on plastics substrates. A seedless hydrothermal process is employed for the growth of single crystalline vertically orientated ZnO NWs at around 100oC. Flexible NG are assembled using ∼7μm thick PDMS polymer matrix on a 3x3cm substrate. A representative device with an active area of 4cm2 is characterised revealing average output voltage generation of ∼22mV (±1.2) and -32mV (±0.16) in the positive and negative cycles after 3-4mm periodic deflection at 20Hz. A power density of ∼288nW/cm3 is estimated for the device. It is envisaged that such energy scavengers may find potential applications targeting self-powered systems, sensors and on-body charging of electronics

The presence of a supersaturation of Si self-interstitials in ion implanted silicon has been shown to be the origin of several physical phenomena such as transient enhanced diffusion (TED) of boron, the formation of extended defects at the projected range of implanted atoms at doses below the amorphization threshold, and the formation of end-of-range (EOR) defects in the case of a preamorphization stage. In this article, we discuss the relation between boron anomalous diffusion and end-of-range defects. Modeling of the behavior of these defects upon annealing allows one to understand why and how they affect dopant diffusion. This is possible through the development of the Ostwald ripening theory applied to extrinsic dislocation loops. This theory is shown to give access to the variations of the mean supersaturation of Si self-interstitial atoms between the loops and also to be responsible for anomalous diffusion. This initial supersaturation is, before annealing, at least five decades larger than the equilibrium value and exponentially decays with time upon annealing with activation energies that are the same as the ones observed for TED. It is shown that this time decay is precisely at the origin of the transient enhancement of boron diffusivity through the interstitial component of boron diffusion. Side experiments shed light on the effect of the proximity of a free surface on the thermal behavior of EOR defects and allow us to quantitatively describe the space and time evolutions of boron diffusivity upon annealing of preamorphized Si layers.

The present work demonstrates the production of single crystalline ZnO nanowires (NWs) using the low temperature hydrothermal process and their integration as the active channel material and piezoelectric elements in single NW field-effect transistors (FETs) and functional nanogenerators (NGs), respectively. Even though hydrothermally grown ZnO NWs show high levels of excess free carriers ≫10¹⁸ cm⁻³, we show that an optimized thermal annealing process at just 450 °C in atmospheric air sufficiently reduces this level to around ∼3.7 × 10¹⁷ cm⁻³. The excess free carrier suppression is verified by assessing the field-effect transport behaviour in a single NW FET. The single device is found to exhibit good performance metrics, including low off-state current (pA range), high on-state current (in the 10 s of μA range) and moderate effective mobility (∼10 cm² V⁻¹ s⁻¹). The functional NGs are based on vertically grown ZnO NWs with ∼7 μm thick polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) polymer matrix. We show that a NG incorporating annealed ZnO NWs can continuously generate higher output voltages and power compared to a reference device based on as-grown ZnO NWs. This included peak output voltage of ∼109 mV and an output power density of ∼16 μW cm⁻³. We envisage that this approach of thermal annealing may find practical applications in other areas of hydrothermal ZnO NW research, including high performance NW FETs and piezoelectric energy harvesters.