Crystalline SiC layers have been grown by a large number of techniques on the surfaces of different substrates.
Most of the crystal growth processes are based on chemical vapor deposition (CVD), solid-source molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and gas-source MBE on Si as well as SiC substrates, which will be exclusively reviewed in the following.
+The availability and reproducibility of Si substrates of controlled purity made it the first choice for SiC epitaxy.
+The heteroepitaxial growth of SiC on Si substrates has been stimulated for a long time due to the lack of suitable large substrates that could be adopted for homoepitaxial growth.
+Furthermore, heteroepitaxy on Si substrates enables the fabrication of the advantageous 3C polytype, which constitutes a metastable phase and, thus, can be grown as a bulk crystal only with small sizes of a few mm.
\section{Ion beam synthesis of cubic silicon carbide}