A Silicon Carbide Foundry for NASA's UV and High Temperature CMOS Electronics Needs

CoolCAD Electronics has developed a patent-pending technology to design and fabricate Silicon Carbide (SiC) MOSFET opto-electronic integrated circuits (ICs). We both fully design and fabricate these SiC Opto-Electronic ICs in the U.S. using our own design methodologies, SiC process recipes and in-house fabrication facility. We will design, fabricate and test SiC Extreme, Vacuum and Deep Ultraviolet photodetectors. We will prototype PN Junction and Schottky barrier linear photodiodes, as well as low dark count avalanche photodiodes. We will design and fabricate a two-dimensional 256 by 256 passive UV SiC focal plane array. Array elements will be fabricated in-house, out of both PN junction and Schottky barrier detectors, using CoolCAD's process and facilities. We will design and fabricate opto-electronic integrated circuits, where we will integrate various types of detectors with a MOS operational amplifier into a single IC to actively convert the photo current to usable voltage levels. We will also design and fabricate an integrated photodetector and 3-Transistor pixel for active readout. Multiple active pixel readout 3-T circuits will be an array to form a SiC active pixel MOS Deep UV imager. Our in-house fabrication process will also be upgraded. We will automate optical alignment to improve our microfabrication resolution and reduce minimum feature size. We will perform gate oxide anneals to improve carrier mobility. Improving mobility and reducing the minimum feature size will increase MOSFET performance and increase speed of opto-integrated circuits. Furthermore, SiC allows for optoelectronic operation at high temperatures. We will test our circuits up to 500C and utilize special metal contact stacks to enhance high temperature reliability. Finally, we will make our in-house process available to NASA and provide a process development kit for use of our fabrication facility to prototype new application specific SiC integrated circuits.