Basal plane dislocations (BPDs) are an important category of extended defects in SiC
epilayers. They act as nucleation sites for single layer Shockley-type stacking faults which
account for the degradation of the bipolar devices operating under forward bias. It is well
documented that most of the BPDs in the SiC epilayers propagate from the substrates.
However, two characteristic types of BPDs were suggested to be due to either nucleation or
multiplication during epitaxy, including interfacial dislocations and short BPD arrays …