Design and fabrication of 10-kV silicon–carbide p-channel IGBTs with hexagonal cells and step space modulated junction termination extension*

Abstract

10-kV 4H–SiC p-channel insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) are designed, fabricated, and characterized in this paper. The IGBTs have an active area of 2.25 mm2 with a die size of 3 mm × 3 mm. A step space modulated junction termination extension (SSM-JTE) structure is introduced and fabricated to improve the blocking performance of the IGBTs. The SiC p-channel IGBTs with SSM-JTE termination exhibit a leakage current of only 50 nA at −10 kV. To improve the on-state characteristics of SiC IGBTs, the hexagonal cell (H-cell) structure is designed and compared with the conventional interdigital cell (I-cell) structure. At an on-state current of 50 A/cm2, the voltage drops of I-cell IGBT and H-cell IGBT are 10.1 V and 8.3 V respectively. Meanwhile, on the assumption that the package power density is 300 W/cm2, the maximum permissible current densities of the I-cell IGBT and H-cell IGBT are determined to be 34.2 A/cm2 and 38.9 A/cm2 with forward voltage drops of 8.8 V and 7.8 V, respectively. The differential specific on-resistance of I-cell structure and H-cell structure IGBT are 72.36 m Ω · cm 2 and 56.92 m Ω · cm 2 , respectively. These results demonstrate that H-cell structure silicon carbide IGBT with SSM-JTE is a promising candidate for high power applications.