Impact of design and process variation on the fabrication of SiC diodes

Abstract

We have studied the influence of design and process variations on the electrical performance of SiC Schottky diodes. On the design side, two design variations are used in the active cell of the diode (segment design and stripe design). In addition, there are two more design variations employed for the edge termination layout of the diodes, namely, field limiting ring (FLR) and junction termination extension (JTE). On the process side, some diodes have gone through an N2O annealing step. The segment design resulted in a lower forward voltage drop (VF) in the diodes and the FLR design turned out to be a better choice for blocking voltages, in the reverse bias. Also, N2O annealing has shown a detrimental effect on the diodes’ blocking performance, which have JTE as their termination design. It degrades the blocking capability of the diodes significantly.