Biography: John Robertson is an expert primarily in Electronic Device Materials, including Carbon materials, Low Dimenstional Materials, Transparent conducting oxides and Chalcogenides like GeSbTe. He is interested, for this talk, in the properties of SiC interfaces and its low effective carrier mobility. He is an FRS and FREng with an H index of ~150 (Google).

Origin of Low Field Effect Mobility at SiC/SiO2 Interfaces

John Robertson

Engineering Dept, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB3 0FA, UK

SiC is an important power semiconductor for transport and related applications. SiC is known to suffer from a much reduced effective mobility in CMOS devices due to SiC/SiO2 interface states which has been unresolved since Saks et al (2000)[1]. The states are seen in CV by Afanasev [2] and could be due to carbon cluster defects, SiO2 defects or O vacancies in the SiO2, but it is not agreed. However, the presence of excess carbon defects in not seen properly by MEIS [3], photoemission [4] or TEM [5]. Robertson produced a carbon cluster model of the defects [6]. However the reduced mobility has less effect than expected when using the vertical current flow in super-junction designs and trench substrates [7]. Interestingly, the view of USA and Japanese groups is not so similar on the origins of these effects. This will be discussed in the talk.

1. N S Saks, S S Mani, A K Agarwal, App Phys Lett 76 2250 (2000)

2. V Afanasev et al, Phys Stat Solidi A 162 321 (1997)

3. X Zhu... L Feldman, et al, APL 97 071908 (2010)

4. H Watanabe et al, App Phys Let 99 021907 (2011)

5. M Saito, et al, Acta Materialia 221 117360 (2021)

6. F Udrea et al, ISPSD paper 4-2 (2021) and 4C2 lecture 8.

7. Z Zhang, Y Guo, J Robertson, App Phys Lett 118 031601 (2021)

8. S Dhar, SISC conference (2023) SanDiego; T Kimoto, Proc Jpn Acad Ser B 98 161 (2022)