Transient electro-thermal analysis of dynamic punch-through in SiC power devices

Because of its rather large ionization energies compared to Si, dopants of SiC have larger ionization time constants. Therefore, dynamically enlarged space charge regions, eventually resulting in a punch-through (PT) situation in certain device structures, can easily occur. The detailed numerical analysis presented in this paper shows that the high currents caused by PT are able to destroy SiC power devices. As a consequence, the effect of dynamic PT has to be taken into account designing SiC devices.