High-Temperature High-Power Silicon Carbide Power Device for Hybrid Vehicles

TDI proposes to develop high-power silicon carbide normally off junction field effect transistor (JFET) for military and commercial applications. Recently TDI has reported silicon carbide pn structures grown by sublimation and liquid phase epitaxy anddemonstrated building blocks for SiC power devices including low resistivity Ohmic contacts to p-SiC, highly doped p+-4H-SiC layers, 4H-SiC pn diode chips with breakdown field > 2MV/cm and low leakage current. 6H-SiC diode chips with stable electricbreakdown at 50 kW/cm2 dissipating power were demonstrated. These results open the opportunity to fabricate robust high-power high-current SiC devices. JFET is known as most reliable and rugged device with excellent current sharing capabilities havingmuch better high-temperature reliability than Schottky diodes, MESFETs or MOSFETs. The goal of the Phase I is to prove the concept, design, demonstrate and test 4H-SiC normally off JFET. Detail device modeling will be performed to optimizehigh-power/high-current device performance. Modeling and experimental results will be compared with published data. In the Phase II, we will focus on the fabrication and characterization of SiC power JFETs scaled to 1500 V and 2000 A level.Highperformance SiC power devices for electric power conversion and traction motor control will find a host of applications in military vehicles, air platforms, space platforms, in commercial components like industrial motor drives, power converters and powersupplies.