Silicon carbide can be used in the production of graphene because of its chemical properties that promote the production of graphene on the surface of SiC nanostructures.
When it comes to its production, silicon is used primarily as a substrate to grow the graphene. But there are actually several methods that can be used to grow the graphene on the silicon carbide. The confinement controlled sublimation (CCS) growth method consists of a SiC chip that is heated under vacuum with graphite. Then the vacuum is released very gradually to control the growth of graphene. This method yields the highest quality graphene layers. But other methods have been reported to yield the same product as well.
Another way of growing graphene would be thermally decomposing SiC at a high temperature within a vacuum. But this method turns out to yield graphene layers that contain smaller grains within the layers. So there have been efforts to improve the quality and yield of graphene. One such method is to perform ex situ graphitization of silicon terminated SiC in an atmosphere consisting of argon. This method has proved to yield layers of graphene with larger domain sizes than the layer that would be attainable via other methods. This new method can be very viable to make higher quality graphene for a multitude of technological applications.
When it comes to understanding how or when to use these methods of graphene production, most of them mainly produce or grow this graphene on the SiC within a growth enabling environment. It is utilized most often at rather higher temperatures (such as 1300 °C) because of SiC thermal properties. However, there have been certain procedures that have been performed and studied that could potentially yield methods that use lower temperatures to help manufacture graphene. More specifically this different approach to graphene growth has been observed to produce graphene within a temperature environment of around 750 °C. This method entails the combination of certain methods like chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and surface segregation. And when it comes to the substrate, the procedure would consist of coating a SiC substrate with thin films of a transition metal. And after the rapid heat treating of this substance, the carbon atoms would then become more abundant at the surface interface of the transition metal film which would then yield graphene. And this process was found to yield graphene layers that were more continuous throughout the substrate surface.