Thermal-oxidation-free dielectrics for SiC power devices

Compared with other wide bandgap materials, silicon carbide (SiC) possesses the significant advantage of an SiO
₂
native oxide. However, both thermally grown and deposited oxides on SiC suffer from poor interface quality, and thus both require post deposition anneals in nitric oxide (NO) to obtain usable MOS devices [1], [2]. We report an alternate approach where a passivated, disorder free oxide-SiC interface on 4H-SiC is formed without thermal oxidation. The passivated surface contains a fully saturated monolayer of nitrogen incorporated at the oxide-SiC interface. This process leads to fewer interface traps than the NO anneal process, and shows great promise for improving the channel mobility of MOSFETs.