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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The instability of Al2O3/4H-SiC interface at various process temperatures and ambient is investigated by the annealing of Al2O3/4H-SiC in low vacuum conditions as well as in N2 environments. Atomic layer deposited Al2O3 on a 4H-SiC substrate with 3, 6 and 10 nm of thicknesses is treated at 300, 500, 700 and 900 °C under the vacuum level of 10−1 torr. The as-deposited and annealed structures are analyzed using x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. It is hypothesized that the minute quantity of oxygen present in low vacuum conditions diffuses through thin layers of Al2O3 and helps in forming SiO2 at the interface even at low temperatures (i.e. 300 °C), which plays a pivotal role in determining the electrical properties of the interface. It is also proved that the absence of oxygen in the ambient prevents the formation of SiO2 at low temperatures. Additionally, it is observed that Al–OH is present in as-deposited layers, which gradually reduces after annealing. However, at around 700 °C, the concentration of oxygen in the whole structure increases to maximum and reduces at 900 °C.

Abstract-Radiation effects of 3-MeV protons on 4H-SiC bipolar devices and integrated OR-NOR gates have been investigated. The chips were irradiated from a fluence of cm until cm . Up until a fluence of cm , both the bipolar devices and the logic gates were found to be stable, but for higher fluence, they begin to degrade as a function of irradiation fluence. Using TCAD simulations, degradation of the transistor current gain has been found to be more dominated by surface states than bulk defects generated by the proton irradiation. Simulations of logic circuits using SPICE show that the gain degradation is the key contribution to the unstable performance of the circuits from the fluence of cm and above.