Shallow impurities are the principal means of affecting the electrical prop
erties of semiconductors in order to induce desired characteristics. They c
an be used to isolate a region by introducing carriers of opposite charge,
or they can be used to enhance the number of carriers of a particular type.
Thermal admittance spectroscopy has been used to determine the activation
energies of the principal p-type dopants, Al and B, in 4H and 6H-SiC, and t
emperature dependent Hall effect measurements were used to study the shallo
w B accepters in 6H-SiC. The acceptor species B and Al occupy inequivalent
lattice sites in the Si sublattice, and would be expected to exhibit distin
ct energy levels for each site in analogy to the well known donor energy le
vels of N. Activation energies for B in 6H-SiC were found to be E-h = E-v 0.27 eV, E-k1 = E-v + 0.31 eV, and E-k2 = E-v + 0.38 eV. Al accepters in 4
H-SiC were found to-exhibit-two energy levels at E-h = E-v + 0.212 eV and E
-k = E-v +0.266 eV.