Prolonged 500°C Operation of 100+ Transistor Silicon Carbide Integrated Circuits

Abstract

This report describes more than 5000 hours of successful 500 °C operation of semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) with more than 100 transistors. Multiple packaged chips with two different 4H-SiC junction field effect transistor (JFET) technology demonstrator circuits have surpassed thousands of hours of oven-testing at 500 °C. After 100 hours of 500 °C burn-in, the circuits (except for 2 failures) exhibit less than 10% change in output characteristics for the remainder of 500 °C testing. We also describe the observation of important differences in IC materials durability when subjected to the first nine constituents of Venus-surface atmosphere at 9.4 MPa and 460 °C in comparison to what is observed for Earth-atmosphere oven testing at 500 °C.