Gate oxide reliability of 4H-SiC V-groove trench MOSFET under various stress conditions

Abstract

The authors reported the optimization of the 4H-SiC V-groove Trench MOSFET (VMOSFET) structure in a previous conference (ISPSD2015). The VMOSFET has the buried p+ regions in the epitaxial layer to protect the trench bottom oxide. In this study, we characterized the long-term gate oxide reliability of the VMOSFETs under various stress conditions such as the gate bias or the drain bias. The VMOSFETs showed the Qbd of 28 Ccm-2 under the constant current stress TDDB measurement at RT. The threshold voltage of the VMOSFETs did not change significantly (|ΔV <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">th</sub> |<; 0.12 V) under both the static and the switching gate bias conditions at 175°C for more than 1000 hours. The gate leakage current after the drain bias test did not change for over 6500 hours. In addition, the SCSOA of the VMOSFET was larger than 10 μsec.