Study on Electrical Characteristics According Process Parameters of Field Plate for Optimizing SiC Shottky Barrier Diode

Silicon carbide (SiC) is being spotlighted as a next-generation power semiconductor material owing to the characteristic limitations of the existing silicon materials. SiC has a wider band gap, higher breakdown voltage, higher thermal conductivity, and higher saturation electron mobility than those of Si. When using this material to implement Schottky barrier diode (SBD) devices, SBD-state operation loss and switching loss can be greatly reduced as compared to that of traditional Si. However, actual SiC SBDs exhibit a lower dielectric breakdown voltage than the theoretical breakdown voltage that causes the electric field concentration, a phenomenon that occurs on the edge of the contact surface as in conventional power semiconductor devices. Therefore in order to obtain a high breakdown voltage, it is necessary to distribute the electric field concentration using the edge termination structure. In this paper, we designed an edge termination structure using a field plate structure through oxide etch angle control, and optimized the structure to obtain a high breakdown voltage. We designed the edge termination structure for a 650 V breakdown voltage using Sentaurus Workbench provided by IDEC. We conducted field plate experiments. under the following conditions: $15^{\circ}$, $30^{\circ}$, $45^{\circ}$, $60^{\circ}$, and $75^{\circ}$. The experimental results indicated that the oxide etch angle was $45^{\circ}$ when the breakdown voltage characteristics of the SiC SBD were optimized and a breakdown voltage of 681 V was obtained.