Argon Bombardment of 4H Silicon Carbide Substrates for Tailored Schottky Diode Barrier Heights

摘要

In this paper, the impact of substrate preconditioning by ion bombardment in-situ in a conventional sputter equipment on n-doped 4H-silicon carbide (SiC) Schottky diodes with molybdenum nitride metallization is studied. By variation of the plasma power during argon ion bombardment, the effective barrier height is adjustable in the range from 0.66 to 0.96 eV, as deduced by current / voltage measurements over a wide temperature range. Therefore, this approach offers a straightforward method to tailor the Schottky barrier height over a significant range by introducing an in-situ substrate pretreatment step available in most sputter equipment.