Original Field Plate to Decrease the Maximum Electric Field Peak for High-Voltage Diamond Schottky Diode

Houssam Arbess (1) , Karine Isoird (1) , Saleem Hamady (1) , Moustafa Zerarka (1) , Dominique Planson (2)

1 LAAS-ISGE - Équipe Intégration de Systèmes de Gestion de l'Énergie
2 EE - Ampère, Département Energie Electrique

Diamond is a promising material for future high voltage applications because of its high critical electric field. This property leads to new constraints on the used termination structure, especially in terms of electric field value. For this reason, new termination architectures based on field plate are proposed for diamond Schottky diodes. Using finite element simulations with Sentaurus TCAD (technology computer-aided design) software, a new field plate structure has been proposed. Simple variations in the classic field plate architecture were sufficient to increase the breakdown voltage from 1632 V to 2141 V at 700 K, but not to reduce the electric field value at the edges of field plate. Several termination topologies have been proposed to solve this problem. Parametric simulations were used to optimize the geometrical termination structure in order to reduce the electric field peak value at its edge while maintaining high breakdown voltage. The new solutions have helped reducing the maximum electric field from 57 MV/cm down to 22.7 MV/cm.

Mots clés: Schottky diode; Diamond; Field plate architecture; junction termination; TCAD simulation

Domaines: Micro et nanotechnologies/Microélectronique

Houssam Arbess, Karine Isoird, Saleem Hamady, Moustafa Zerarka, Dominique Planson. Original Field Plate to Decrease the Maximum Electric Field Peak for High-Voltage Diamond Schottky Diode. IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, 2015, 62 (9), pp. 2945-2951. ⟨10.1109/TED.2015.2456073⟩. ⟨hal-01218835⟩