Influence of crystal orientation on the current gain in 4H-SiC BJTs

The 4H-SiC bipolar junction transistors (BJT) are considered as efficient high power switching devices due to the ability of obtaining very low specific on-resistance compared to FET based devices. However, one drawback with the present high voltage BJTs is the relatively low current gain. To reduce the power required by the drive circuit, it is important to increase the common-emitter current gain (β). 4H-SiC (0001) Si-face has become a favorable plane for vertical power BJTs with epitaxial layers that shows higher mobility along the c-axis and provides higher current gain. Furthermore, important progress on improving the current gain focused on the quality of surface passivation at the SiC/SiO₂ interface has been reported during previous years. Higher quality of passivation can provide less interface traps and thereby minimizes the surface recombination current. Conventionally, vertical 4H-SiC BJTs are fabricated along the [11_00] direction on (0001) Si-face. However due to anisotropic properties of 4H-SiC, different orientations on Si-face can also affect the base current of the BJT through variation of mobility and interface traps density distribution along each direction. In this work, single-finger small area BJTs are fabricated on (0001) Si-face along [12_10], [011_0], [112_0] and [11_00] directions. This design can provide various orientations of BJTs that corresponds to an angular range between 0 to 180 degrees relative to conventional [11_00] direction. The goal was to find a correlation between different crystallographic orientation, mobility and interface traps density distribution through transistor characteristics and finally comparison with simulation. Fig.1 shows a cross section and top view of fabricated BJTs. The n⁺ emitter epi-layer is 1.35 μm nitrogen doped to 6×10¹⁸ cm^-3 and capped by 200-nm-thick 2×10¹⁹ cm^-3 layer. The base epi-layer is 650 nm Al-d- - oped with concentration of 4.3×10¹⁷ cm^-3. The drift n^- epilayer is 20 μm thick and doped to 6×10¹⁵ cm^-3. Inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etching with an oxide mask was used to form emitter and base mesas. Fig.2 is a comparison of the maximum current gain with different orientations normalized to the maximum current gain along [11_00] before surface passivation and contact metallization. The results indicate that the maximum current gain is orientation-dependent and has a maximum for BJTs with the emitter edge aligned to the [112_0] direction. The variation effect of planar mobility and interface traps concentration on the current gain is simulated based on the previous work and is illustrated in Fig.3. The simulation shows that interface oxide charges has more influence on the current gain compared to the mobility and higher current gain is attributed to lower oxide interface charges. The orientation dependence of the transistor parameters such as maximum current gain after passivation and the base resistance will be evaluated and compared with simulation.