An Investigation into the Impact of Surface Passivation Techniques Using Metal-Semiconductor Interfaces

Abstract

Schottky barrier diodes (SBD) were fabricated on SiC surfaces that had been treated with different surface passivation techniques, so that metal-semiconductor analysis could be used to evaluate the quality of this surface. In this paper, we discuss the results of this study that used Current-Voltage (I-V), Capacitance-Voltage (C-V) and Current-Voltage-Temperature (I-V-T) analysis to look at the impact of untreated oxidation, Nitrous oxide (N2O) and Phosphorus Silicate Glass (PSG) treatments prior to oxide removal, and the formation of Mo, Ni and Ti diodes. While the results of this study did not reveal any consistent patterns between the different treatments, a Mo diode formed on a surface after PSG treatment, displays exceptionally low leakage (4.44×10-5 A/cm2 at 19°C; 7.26×10-4 A/cm2 at 300°C) given a low barrier height (1.27 eV). Moreover, the barrier heights extracted from C-V analysis before contact annealing show a variation across all the diodes, suggesting that the interface is greatly suffering from Fermi-Level pinning, the result of significant interface traps.