Design and fabrication of 10-kV silicon–carbide p-channel IGBTs with hexagonal cells and step space modulated junction termination extension**Project supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2015CB759600), the Science Challenge Project, China (Grant No. TZ2018003), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61474113, 61574140, and 61804149), the Beijing NOVA Program, China (Grant Nos. 2016071 and

Abstract

10-kV 4H–SiC p-channel insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) are designed, fabricated, and characterized in this paper. The IGBTs have an active area of 2.25 mm2 with a die size of 3 mm × 3 mm. A step space modulated junction termination extension (SSM-JTE) structure is introduced and fabricated to improve the blocking performance of the IGBTs. The SiC p-channel IGBTs with SSM-JTE termination exhibit a leakage current of only 50 nA at −10 kV. To improve the on-state characteristics of SiC IGBTs, the hexagonal cell (H-cell) structure is designed and compared with the conventional interdigital cell (I-cell) structure. At an on-state current of 50 A/cm2, the voltage drops of I-cell IGBT and H-cell IGBT are 10.1 V and 8.3 V respectively. Meanwhile, on the assumption that the package power density is 300 W/cm2, the maximum permissible current densities of the I-cell IGBT and H-cell IGBT are determined to be 34.2 A/cm2 and 38.9 A/cm2 with forward voltage drops of 8.8 V and 7.8 V, respectively. The differential specific on-resistance of I-cell structure and H-cell structure IGBT are and , respectively. These results demonstrate that H-cell structure silicon carbide IGBT with SSM-JTE is a promising candidate for high power applications.