Lateral 1200V SiC schottky barrier diode with single event burnout tolerance

For a power device to be used in space, it must be able to recover from a single event effect caused by heavy ion radiation. Conventional vertical silicon carbide (SiC) power devices such as automotive diodes and MOSFETs, can only meet this requirement if they are heavily derated, a 1200 V device typically unusable above 200 V. In this paper, a lateral RESURF Schottky diode has been designed in TCAD simulation using a radiation-hard (rad-hard) by design methodology. By preventing anode-to-cathode shorting that occurs in a vertical drift region, the lateral design is shown to recover after a heavy ion traverses the device with a linear energy transfer (LET) of 60 MeV·cm2/mg, while the device is blocking 1200 V. The design splits the drift region into a higher doping zone closer to the cathode (Zone 2) of 1.5×1017 cm−3 and a lower doping zone closer to the anode (Zone 1) of 1×1016 cm−3. The electric field spikes were reduced while the device was recovering. This design keeps the local temperature in the device to under 1000 K if the heavy ion penetrates the device in a direction perpendicular to the surface. Other entry positions and directions are also simulated and a maximum temperature of 1733 K occurs when the ion path is horizontal, entering at 1 μm below the surface. However, this temperature peak occurs at the cathode, which is not expected to lead to lasting leakage damage. A deep P+ pillar embedded into the anode acts as a collector for holes generated during the single event. Simulations show that a deeper P+ pillar, to a depth of up to 5 μm, reduces the hole density in the N-drift region and P-epi layer during recovery. This also allows the Zone 1 doping to be increased to as much as 5×1016 cm−3, thereby reducing on-state losses.