Abstract
Microwave plasma oxidation under a relatively high pressure (6 kPa) region is developed to rapidly grow a high-quality SiO2 layer on 4H-SiC, based on a thermodynamic analysis of SiC oxidation. By optimizing the plasma power, an atomically flat interface is achieved, and the interface trap density is lower than that of standard 1300 °C thermal-oxidized and 1350 °C NO-annealed samples measured by various methods under multiple temperature conditions. Moreover, the oxide breakdown field is higher than 9.3 MV/cm, which is comparable to that of a sample produced by high-temperature thermal oxidation. Particularly, the results of electron energy loss spectroscopy show that the transition layer between 4H-SiC and SiO2 is lower than 2 nm, indicating that microwave plasma oxidation can greatly suppress the formation of interface defects. The results strongly demonstrate the effectiveness of high-pressure plasma oxidation for SiC.
Highlights
Silicon carbide (SiC) is an attractive material currently used in areas requiring high temperature, high power, and high speed
SiC, especially 4H-SiC transistors, suffers large interface traps, which causes a substantial degradation in device performance; for example, the SiC metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs), through the thermal oxidation method, show rather low electron mobility (30–50 cm2/V s)6,7 compared to the mobility of bulk SiC (600 cm2/V s)
Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and atomic force microscopy (AFM) were carried out to analyze the chemical components and physical structures of the oxidation gate stacks
Summary
Silicon carbide (SiC) is an attractive material currently used in areas requiring high temperature, high power, and high speed. Satoh et al.20 reported a rapid plasma oxidation method of SiC with a relatively low pressure (100 mTorr) at a substrate temperature of 200 ○C.
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