A Process Design Kit (PDK) has been developed to realize complex integrated circuits in Silicon Carbide (SiC) bipolar low-power technology. The PDK development process included basic device modeling, and design of gate library and parameterized cells. A transistor–transistor logic (TTL)-based PDK gate library design will also be discussed with delay, power, noise margin, and fan-out as main design criterion to tolerate the threshold voltage shift, beta ( β ) and collector current ( I C ) variation of SiC devices as temperature increases. The PDK-based complex digital ICs design flow based on layout, physical verification, and in-house fabrication process will also be demonstrated. Both combinational and sequential circuits have been designed, such as a 720-device ALU and a 520-device 4 bit counter. All the integrated circuits and devices are fully characterized up to 500 °C. The inverter and a D-type flip-flop (DFF) are characterized as benchmark standard cells. The proposed work is a key step towards SiC-based very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits implementation for high-temperature applications.
Silicon carbide (SiC) integrated circuits have been suggested for extreme environment operation. The challenge of a new technology is to develop process flow, circuit models and circuit designs for a wide temperature range. A bipolar technology was chosen to avoid the gate dielectric weakness and low mobility drawback of SiC MOSFETs. Higher operation temperatures and better radiation hardness have been demonstrated for bipolar integrated circuits. Both digital and analog circuits have been demonstrated in the range from room temperature to 500 °C. Future steps are to demonstrate some mixed signal circuits of greater complexity. There are remaining challenges in contacting, metallization, packaging and reliability.
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