Experimental and Simulation Study of Single-Event Leakage Current Degradation and Damage Mechanism in 4H-SiC PiN Diodes

This work studies the single-event leakage current (SELC) degradation and the damage mechanism of the 4H-silicon carbide (SiC) p-i-n (PiN) diodes through experiments and simulations. Experimental results show that material damage near the p+/n− junction and metal damage at the p+/metal interface are observed in the near-surface region of the PiN diode after single-event radiation. The simulation results suggest that the transient strong electric field and high temperature near the p+/n− junction may cause these damages and eventually lead to SELC degradation. Based on the mechanism analyses, the new PiN diodes with multitype buffer layers (MBLs-PiN) are proposed. The results show that the simulated SELC threshold of MBLs-PiN is improved by a factor of about 2 compared with that of conventional PiN diodes (C-PiN).