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Single event burnout sensitivity of SiC and Si

Littlefair, Matthew Thomas Michael; Simdyankin, Sergei; Turvey, Simon; Groves, Chris; Horsfall, Alton B.

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Authors

Sergei Simdyankin

Simon Turvey



Abstract

Exposure to ionizing radiation has the potential to catastrophically modify the operation, and destroy, electronic components in microseconds. The electrification of aircraft necessitates the need to use the most power dense and lowest loss semiconductor devices available, and the increasing supply voltages results in extremely high electric fields within the devices. These conditions create the worst case environment for the Single Event Effect (SEE), the instantaneous alteration in device response after high energy particle interaction, with a destructive form of SEE, the Single Event Burnout (SEB), resulting in total failure of the device with potentially explosive consequences. To enable circuits to operate with these high supply voltages, SiC is rapidly becoming the semiconductor of choice. However, the radiation response of SiC power devices during operation is unknown. Here we show that SiC offers a 60% reduction in cosmic ray sensitivity in comparison to Si devices with an equivalent voltage rating. The data show that Si fails when subjected to a heavy ion impact with Linear Energy Transfer (LET) equivalent to 0.2% of the silver ions commonly used for Single Event Effect testing. In total contrast, we show that SiC does not exhibit failure during exposure to any heavy ion LET up to values three times greater than those commonly used in testing at any bias up to 99% of the breakdown voltage. The data show that SiC is a robust material and therefore has the potential to replace Si as the material of choice for high reliability avionic applications, as it far exceeds the performance of Si in cosmic ray environments, facilitating significant advances in the electrification of aircraft to be made in the near future.

Citation

Littlefair, M. T. M., Simdyankin, S., Turvey, S., Groves, C., & Horsfall, A. B. (2022). Single event burnout sensitivity of SiC and Si. Semiconductor Science and Technology, 37(6), Article 065013. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6641/ac668c

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Apr 12, 2022
Online Publication Date Apr 26, 2022
Publication Date 2022-06
Deposit Date Apr 20, 2022
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Semiconductor Science and Technology
Print ISSN 0268-1242
Electronic ISSN 1361-6641
Publisher IOP Publishing
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 37
Issue 6
Article Number 065013
DOI https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6641/ac668c

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Copyright Statement
Original Content from this work may be used under the
terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any
further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and
the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.






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