Proton Irradiation-Induced Reliability Degradation of SiC Power MOSFET

Abstract

The effect of 53 MeV proton irradiation on the reliability of silicon carbide power MOSFETs was investigated. Post-irradiation gate voltage stress was applied and early failures in time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) test were observed for irradiated devices. The applied drain voltage during irradiation affects the degradation probability observed by TDDB tests. Proton-induced single event burnouts (SEB) were observed for devices which were biased close to their maximum rated voltage. The secondary particle production as a result of primary proton interaction with the device material was simulated with the Geant4-based toolkit.

SiC MOSFET Micro-Explosion Due to a Single Event Burnout: Analysis at the Device and Die Levels

“…These bias settings have been chosen to ensure the creation of SEB phenomena [16]. The test circuit is similar to the experiment described in [19], where DUTs were connected in parallel to the high voltage. The 53 MeV proton beam was obtained from the K130 cyclotron.…”

“…Four of these SiC MOSFETs were randomly selected for the further failure analysis. An analysis of the statistical properties of the SEB mechanism by applying Weibull statistics is presented in [19] indicating random failure over time, for this device irradiated with 53 MeV protons.…”

“…In [18], authors propose a mapmaking of the type of damages (oxide latent damage, degradation, crystal latent damage and SEB) as a function of the VDS and the LET. On top of the catastrophic failure, for the devices irradiated with protons which did not exhibit SEB, an irradiation-induced gate oxide degradation has been observed in the post-irradiation stress tests [19]. And for heavy-ions, the decomposition of the SiC crystal lattice was revealed after a post-irradiation VDS sweep, in the pre-SEB region for SiC MOSFET bare dies [18].…”