AVS 45th International Symposium
    Electronic Materials and Processing Division Tuesday Sessions
       Session EM+SE-TuM

Invited Paper EM+SE-TuM7
Progress in SiC: From Material Growth to Commercial Device Development

Tuesday, November 3, 1998, 10:20 am, Room 316

Session: Critical Issues in Widebandgap Semiconductors
Presenter: C.H. Carter, Cree Research, Inc.
Authors: C.H. Carter, Cree Research, Inc.
V.F. Tsvetkov, Cree Research, Inc.
D. Henshall, Cree Research, Inc.
O. Kordina, Cree Research, Inc.
K. Irvine, Cree Research, Inc.
R. Singh, Cree Research, Inc.
S.T. Allen, Cree Research, Inc.
J. Palmour, Cree Research, Inc.
Correspondent: Click to Email
Silicon carbide technology has made tremendous strides in the last several years, with a variety of encouraging device and circuit demonstrations in addition to volume production of nitride-based blue LEDs being fabricated on SiC substrates. The commercial availability of relatively large, high quality wafers of the 6H and 4H polytypes of SiC for device development has facilitated these exciting breakthroughs in laboratories throughout the world. These have occurred in numerous application areas, including high power devices, short wavelength optoelectronic devices, and high power/high frequency devices. This presentation will describe progress made in increasing the quality and size of SiC wafers, advances in SiC epitaxy and some of the resulting device demonstrations and commercialization by Cree Research. To meet the challenges required for commercialization of SiC semiconductors, we have made specific efforts towards larger diameter high quality substrates which have led to production of 50 mm diameter 4H and 6H wafers for fabrication of LEDs and the demonstration of 75 mm wafers. The latest results on micropipe reduction will be presented including a wafer which contains a total of 7 micropipes, yielding a density of 0.7 cm@super-2@. High voltage P-i-N diodes have been fabricated from hot-wall grown epitaxy using junction termination extension (JTE) edge termination. The highest breakdown voltage achieved for these diodes is >5.5 kV, which is a new world record for blocking voltage for a SiC device. In the microwave device area, a SiC MESFET with 42 mm of gate periphery on a single die which had a maximum RF output power of 53 watts CW with 37% power-added efficiency (PAE) at 3.0 GHz has been demonstrated. This unprecedented power from a die with an area of only 3 mm@super2@ demonstrates the extremely high power handling capability of SiC microwave devices. Additionally, SiC MESFETs showing 2.5 W/mm with 41% PAE at 8 GHz, demonstrate the utility of this technology at X-band.