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Investigation of the Effect of Gate Oxide Screening with Adjustment Pulse on Commercial SiC Power MOSFETs

Journal Article · · Electronics
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  1. The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH (United States)
  2. Ford Motor Company, Dearborn, MI (United States)
+ Show Author Affiliations

This paper presents a method to recover the negative threshold voltage shift during high field gate oxide screening of 1.2 kV 4H-SiC MOSFETs with an additional adjustment gate voltage pulse. To reduce field failure rates of the MOSFETs in operation, manufacturers perform a screening treatment to remove devices with extrinsic defects in the oxide. Current gate oxide screening procedures are limited to oxide fields at or below ~9 MV/cm for short durations (<1 s), which is not enough to remove all the devices with extrinsic defects. The results show that by implementing a lower field gate pulse, the threshold voltage shift can be partially recovered, and therefore the maximum screening field and time can be increased. However, both the initial screening pulse and the adjustment pulse require careful calibration to prevent significant degradation of the device threshold voltage, on-resistance, interface state density, or intrinsic lifetime. With a well calibrated set of pulses, higher screening fields can be utilized without significantly damaging the devices. This leads to an improvement in the overall screening efficiency of the process, reducing the number of devices with extrinsic oxide defects entering the field, and improving the reliability of the SiC MOSFETs in operation.

Research Organization:
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); Ford Motor Company
Grant/Contract Number:
NA0003921
OSTI ID:
2563238
Journal Information:
Electronics, Journal Name: Electronics Journal Issue: 7 Vol. 14; ISSN 2079-9292
Publisher:
MDPICopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (22)

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Figures / Tables (22)

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Related Subjects

42 ENGINEERING
SiC MOSFETs
charge trapping
extrinsic defects
gate oxide reliability
oxide screening
threshold voltage shift