Processing techniques for 4H-SiC devices and circuits are optimized. The SiC mesa etching process has a variation of < 5% over the wafer. The average n-type contact resistivity is 1.15 × 10-6 Ohm.cm2. The fabricated devices and circuits with one-layer metal interconnect have high yield with no need of chemical-mechanical planarization process. More complex circuits with two-layer metal interconnect achieve high yield by applying chemical-mechanical planarization process. 

The p-i-n ultraviolet (UV) photodiodes based on 4H-SiC have been fabricated and characterized from room temperature (RT) to 550 degrees C. Due to bandgap narrowing at higher temperatures, the photocurrent of the photodiode increases by 9 times at 365 nm and reduces by 2.6 times at 275 nm from RT to 550 degrees C. Moreover, a 4H-SiC p-i-n photodiode array has been fabricated. Each column and row of the array is separately connected by two-layer metallization.

4H-SiC p-i-n photodiodes with various mesa areas (40,000μm2, 2500μm2, 1600μm2, and 400μm2) have been fabricated. Both C-V and I-V characteristics of the photodiodes have been measured at room temperature, 200 °C, 400 °C, and 500 °C. The capacitance and photo current (at 365 nm) of the photodiodes are directly proportional to the area. However, the dark current density increases as the device is scaled down due to the perimeter surface recombination effect. The photo to dark current ratio at the full depletion voltage of the intrinsic layer (-2.7 V) of the photodiode at 500 °C decreases 7 times as the size of the photodiode scales down 100 times. The static and dynamic behavior of the photodiodes are modeled with SPICE parameters at the four temperatures.

This paper presents our in-house fabricated 4H-SiC n-p-n phototransistors. The wafer mapping of the phototransistor on two wafers shows a mean maximum forward current gain (βFmax) of 100 at 25 ºC. The phototransistor with the highest βFmax of 113 has been characterized from room temperature to 500 ºC. The βFmax drops to 51 at 400 ºC and remains the same at 500 ºC. The photo current gain of the phototransistor is 3.9 at 25 ºC and increases to 14 at 500 ºC under the 365 nm UV light with the optical power of 0.31 mW. The processing of the phototransistor is same to our 4HSiC-based bipolar integrated circuits, so it is a promising candidate for 4H-SiC opto-electronics onchip integration.

This letter presents the design, fabrication, and characterization of a 4H-SiC n-p-n bipolar junction transistor as a switch controlling an on-chip integrated p-i-n photodiode. The transistor and photodiode share the same epitaxial layers and topside contacts for each terminal. By connecting the collector of the transistor and the anode of the photodiode, the photo current from the photodiode is switched off at low base voltage (cutoff region of the transistor) and switched on at high base voltage (saturation region of the transistor). The transfer voltage of the circuit decreases as the ambient temperature increases (2 mV/degrees C). Both the on-state and off-state current of the circuit have a positive temperature coefficient and the on/off ratio is >80 at temperature ranged from 25 degrees C to 400 degrees C. It is proposed that the on/off ratio can be increased by similar to 1000 times by adding a light blocking layer on the transistor to reduce light induced off-state current in the circuit.

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 ICsdesign 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.