Abstract
Radioactive sources and spectroscopy techniques have been proposed in recent publications as an approach to sense the internal electric field and to assess the susceptibility of power semiconductors devices to terrestrial cosmic rays. In this paper, dedicated experiments and advanced TCAD tools are used to understand the formation and the collection of the charge pulses that are generated by alpha particles in SiC Schottky diodes. Special attention is paid to the processes leading to the multiplication of the carriers' species. It is shown that the charge multiplication process is strongly affected by the location of the interaction zone and on impinging angle of the ionizing particle, along with the biasing condition of the device.
Highlights
Catastrophic failures triggered by Terrestrial Cosmic Radiation (TCR) have been observed in silicon (Si) and silicon carbide (SiC) power devices in the form of Single Event Burnouts (SEB) and single event gate ruptures (SEGR) [1,2,3]
In this paper we investigate by TCAD simulation [21] the processes leading to the formation of the detected charge pulse in the case of an alpha source irradiating a SiC JBS diode biased at different reverse voltages
The transport of carriers generated by ionization through alpha particles in 4H-SiC JBS diodes has been investigated by TCAD and Monte
Summary
Catastrophic failures triggered by Terrestrial Cosmic Radiation (TCR) have been observed in silicon (Si) and silicon carbide (SiC) power devices in the form of Single Event Burnouts (SEB) and single event gate ruptures (SEGR) [1,2,3]. Some literature works report about the TCAD investigation of the interaction of alpha particles with SiC devices for spectroscopy applications [17] In these cases, the charge deposition and collection processes are described for devices with an almost ideal electric field distribution, designed to enhance the radiation-sensing performances, not representative for the power JBS field distribution. This is not representative for the alpha particle case, in which the particle is fully absorbed in the depleted region of the device and the charge deposition is strongly non uniform For this reason, in this paper we investigate by TCAD simulation [21] the processes leading to the formation of the detected charge pulse in the case of an alpha source irradiating a SiC JBS diode biased at different reverse voltages.
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