Self-limiting manifold

As a pronounced contrast, in the field of high performance non-oxide ceramics, currently only binaries are in use. Thus, the manifold opportunities for creating new and ever more capable nitride or carbide ceramics offered by the use of multi-component systems seem to have remained essentially unexplored. The main chemical reason for this lagging behind of non-oxide ceramics are clearly the extremely low self-diffusion coefficients of silicon or boron in their nitrides or carbides [6, 7]. Although the experimental data available are rather limited, the numbers presented in Table 1 [8] suggest that the temperatures needed to complete a solid state reaction between SiC and Si3N4 in an acceptable length of time reach, or even exceed, the decomposition temperature of at least one of the reactants. 

---