Silicon carbide is an attractive material for next-generation power devices, it has wide band gap and high thermal conductivity. SiC power devices can operate at higher temperatures and voltages compared to silicon devices. But, electrical characteristics of the SiC power devices can be deteriorated by SiC defects. The killer defects such as micropipes and stacking faults have been reduced through the development of SiC growth technique. But still the threading dislocations (TDs) and basal plane dislocations (BPDs) lowered the breakdown voltage and increased the leakage current during device operation [1].

In this study, we fabricated the 5 kV 4H-SiC Schottky barrier diode (SBD) to study the effect of SiC defect on electrical properties of SiC SBDs. The thickness of epitaxial layer was 50 um and the doping concentration is 1E15 cm^-3. The device was fabricated with various length of junction termination extension (JTE). Ion implantation was performed to form p surge (Al, 500 °C, 5E19 cm^-3) and JTE (B, 500 °C, 2E18 cm^-3) regions. Activation annealing was performed at 1700 °C for 60 m. 100 and 30-nm-thick Ni were deposited as the cathode and front-side ohmic metal respectively, and then annealed at 950 °C for 90 s in RTA system. Finally, 100-nm-thick Ni was sputtered on front-side as a Schottky contact metal. We investigated the forward, reverse characteristics, and reverse breakdown voltage of the fabricated 4H-SiC SBDs. The diode characteristics, ideality factor (IF) and Schottky barrier height (SBH) were obtained from the forward electrical characteristics, about the 1.23 and 1.3 eV, respectively. The relative highly ideality factor may be due to rough surface of thick epitaxial layer. The breakdown voltage was obtained above 5 kV with JTE length longer than 60 um. During reverse characteristics the electrically weak points were observed using electroluminescence (EL). The EL spot was mainly aroused from electrically leaky points, it mostly observed at the edge of JTE. Some EL spots were observed inside the JTE or active region. The defects of the fabricated 4H-SiC 5 kV SBDs were analyzed using non-destructive analysis method, X-ray topography (XRT) and electron beam induced current (EBIC). We tried to determine the correlation between the electrical characteristics of the device and the crystal defects in the device.

[1] H. Fujiwara, H. Naruoka, M. Konishi, K. Hamada, T. Katsuno, T. Ishikawa, Y. Watanabe, and T. Endo, Appl. Phys. Lett. 100, 242102 (2012).