Impact Ionization Coefficients in 4H-SiC Toward Ultrahigh-Voltage Power Devices

A temperature dependence of impact ionization coefficients in 4H-SiC was studied in a wide range of electric field toward the accurate designing of ultrahigh-voltage devices. The photomultiplication measurement was conducted for various photodiodes with different multiplication layer structures to obtain multiplication factors and ionization coefficients in a wide range of electric field strength. Especially, using multiplication layer structure with low doping concentration, the hole impact ionization coefficient was extracted at low electric field of 1 MV/cm. In high-temperature measurement, the hole ionization coefficient decreased with the increase of temperature, as observed in other semiconductor materials. For the electron ionization coefficient, however, its temperature dependence was very small and values obtained at room temperature could be used, at least up to 150 °C.