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I. I NTRODUCTION
ILICON CARBIDE (SiC) is one of the most promising semiconductor materials for high-voltage, high-speed,
and low-loss power switching applications. Excellent electrical
properties of SiC material, such as wider bandgap (3.26 eV),
higher thermal conductivity (4.9 W/cm K), and higher critical
breakdown electric field (2.2 106 V/cm, which is almost ten
times larger than Si), make it a very attractive semiconductor
material for power switching devices with capabilities that are
superior to those of devices based on silicon technology [1][3].
Owing to recent progress in SiC technology, SiC Schottky
diodes are now commercially available from several companies
such as Cree, GeneSiC, and Infineon. Since power devices
play a key role in power electronics applications, accurate and
computationally efficient power device models are required for
power electronics designers to evaluate the performance of
SiC Schottky diodes in different applications. So far, several
models have been developed for SiC Schottky diodes [4][10].
Manuscript received May 16, 2013; revised October 25, 2013; accepted
January 1, 2014. Date of publication February 5, 2014; date of current version
September 16, 2014. Paper 2013-PEDCC-282.R1, presented at the 2013 IEEE
Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition, Long Beach, CA, USA,
March 1721, and approved for publication in the IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON
I NDUSTRY A PPLICATIONS by the Power Electronic Devices and Components
Committee of the IEEE Industry Applications Society. This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research under Grant N00014-08-1-0080.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University
of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208 USA (e-mail: Ruiyun.Fu@sdsmt.edu;
GREKOV@cec.sc.edu; pengk@email.sc.edu; santi@engr.sc.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIA.2014.2304617
However, these models typically use either some fitting parameters that have no physical meaning or physical parameters that
are difficult to extract from experimental measurements. The
electrothermal macromodel in [4] is a standard piecewise linear
behavioral model. The model is simple, and the parameters
are easy to extract but have no physical meaning. The model
in [5] is a physics-based model implemented in the circuit
simulator Spice. The main feature of this model is that it takes
into account electrothermal (including self-heating) effects, but
it uses a few fitting parameters. The model in [6] is a simple
physics-based model for system modeling. The parameters in
this model are typical values from the literature. The physicsbased numerical model in [7] is based on the solution of the
semiconductor transport equations from the surface to the bulk
region. This model is accurate but complicated. The model in
[8] is a physics-based temperature-dependent model developed
in the Saber circuit simulator for Schottky merged PiN Schottky
(MPS) and PiN power diodes. Although this model can be used
in a wide range of test circuit conditions and for different types
of devices, it needs a few parameters that are unknown to the
designers. The parameter extraction sequence for this model is
given in [9]. Reference [10] shows an accurate analytical model
and complete parameter extraction of the forward characteristics of the Ni/6H-SiC Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs) for lowand high-level current densities using MEDICI program. This
model takes into account high-level injection effects and the
current dependence of the series resistance. The parameters are
extracted using the extraction program EXTRDEV.
In conclusion, some of the proposed physics-based models
provide good accuracy but usually need several device parameters (which are usually unknown to designers) to implement
the model for a specific device, and sometimes, the model
itself is overly complicated and requires long simulation time.
The SiC Schottky diode model presented in this paper is a
simple model that represents the basic physics behavior of the
device. This model has been implemented in PSPICE, a product
of CADENCE Corporation. The detailed parameter extraction
procedure introduced here does not require any knowledge of
device fabrication. The only measurements required for the
parameter extraction are simple static IV characterization and
CV measurement. These measurements are typically given
in the datasheets for commercial devices, so the parameter
extraction procedure can be performed based on datasheets
only. The extraction procedure is applied to several SiC power
diodes from different manufacturers. Results will be presented
for the following:
1) a 600-V 50-A Schottky diode from GeneSiC Inc.;
2) a 1200-V 3-A Schottky diode from GeneSiC Inc.;
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FU et al.: PARAMETER EXTRACTION PROCEDURE FOR A PHYSICS-BASED POWER SiC SCHOTTKY DIODE MODEL
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TABLE I
S CHOTTKY D IODE M ODEL PARAMETERS
LD
qD (T )ND A
(2)
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Fig. 2. (a) Structure of NPT Schottky diode. (b) Electric field distribution
along the drift region.
1
qD ND A
=
.
RD
LD
(6)
(7)
2
.
A2 qND 0 r
(8)
FU et al.: PARAMETER EXTRACTION PROCEDURE FOR A PHYSICS-BASED POWER SiC SCHOTTKY DIODE MODEL
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cation process can affect the barrier height of the diodes. The
barrier height b can be extracted using the following steps.
Rewrite (1) for V kT /q as
ln(I) = ln(Is ) +
qV
.
nkT
(13)
Based on the assumption of a triangular electric field distribution shown in Fig. 2(b), one can calculate the device thickness
based on the breakdown voltage VB as
20 r VB
.
(9)
LD =
qND
Substituting (9) into (6) and squaring both sides, one obtains
S12 =
3 2
D A2
q 3 ND
.
20 r VB
(10)
Rewriting (8) to get an expression for A2 and then substituting it into (10), an expression for carrier concentration as a
function of breakdown voltage and slopes S1 and S2 can be
obtained
S 1 0 r V B S 2
.
(11)
ND =
qD
This is the first parameter extraction equation. Then, substituting the value for ND found using (11) back into (8), the
active area A can be calculated as
2
.
(12)
A=
S2 qND 0 r
For a specific device with known breakdown voltage, by capturing the IV characteristics and CV measurements of the
Schottky diode at room temperature, the drift region parameters
ND , LD , and A can be extracted using (11), (9), and (12),
respectively. The breakdown voltage can be either estimated
from the datasheets or measured with a power curve tracer.
B. Barrier Height b and Temperature Coefficient x
The barrier height b is defined as the potential difference
between the metal Fermi level and the majority carrier band
edge of the semiconductor. Barrier height of Schottky diodes
depends on the fabrication process and semiconductor material.
Any surface contamination introduced during the diode fabri-
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S1 0 r VPT S2
ND =
.
(17)
qD
The parameter extraction procedure for the PT case is identical to the procedure for the NPT case given in Section III,
except that step 3) is modified to the following.
3) Calculate the drift region parameters ND , LD , and A by
using (17), (16), and (12), respectively.
The nonlinear capacitance model in the simple Schottky
diode model needs to be modified: its value needs to have a
lower bound equal to the PT capacitance CPT at voltage VPT .
The IV characteristics and CV characteristics needed for
the extraction procedure can typically be found in the device
datasheet provided by the manufacturer. In this paper, the PT
parameter extraction procedure is applied to the 600-V 4-A PT
Schottky diode C3 D04060A from Cree Inc. Since the Keithley
590 CV measurement setup available in our laboratory is
limited to a maximum bias voltage of 100 V, the parameter
extraction data are obtained from the datasheet. The actual IV
and CV data obtained by scanning the Cree datasheets using
the Plot Digitizer software program are shown in Fig. 6.
V. VALIDATION OF PARAMETER E XTRACTION
P ROCEDURE AND S CHOTTKY D IODE M ODEL
The parameter extraction procedure is applied to several
SiC Schottky diodes: 600-V 50-A, 1200-V 3-A, and 1200-V
7-A Schottky diodes from GeneSiC Inc., and a 1200-V 20-A
FU et al.: PARAMETER EXTRACTION PROCEDURE FOR A PHYSICS-BASED POWER SiC SCHOTTKY DIODE MODEL
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Fig. 7. Comparison of simulated (dashed lines) with experimental (solid lines) static characteristics of SiC Schottky diodes measured at a temperature from 25 C
to 175 C. (a) GeneSiC 1200 V, 3 A. (b) GeneSiC 1200, 7 A. (c) Cree 1200 V, 20 A. (d) GeneSiC 600 V, 50 A. (e) Cree 600 V, 4 A (estimated from datasheet).
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Fig. 8. Comparison of simulated (dashed lines) with experimental (solid lines) CV characteristics of SiC Schottky diodes measured at frequency = 1 MHz.
(a) GeneSiC 1200 V, 3 A. (b) GeneSiC 1200, 7 A. (c) Cree 1200 V, 20 A. (d) GeneSiC 600 V, 50 A. (e) Cree 600 V, 4 A (estimated from datasheet).
VI. D ISCUSSION
The proposed Schottky diode model is a simple physicsbased model whose parameters are extracted using a combination of IV and CV measurements, without the need for
device manufacturing information.
The parameter extraction procedure proposed in this paper
is based on the assumption that the carrier mobility at room
temperature 300 in the drift region is known. The critical
point of the procedure is to obtain the slope S1 from the IV
characteristics and slope S2 from CV measurement so that the
drift region parameters ND , LD , and A can be extracted. These
parameters are critical for the accuracy of the proposed Schottky diode model under both static and dynamic conditions. For
PT devices, the parameter extraction procedure is the same as
that of the NPT devices. The only difference is that the PT
point voltage is used in place of the breakdown voltage in the
equation used to determine the drift region thickness. The IV
characteristics and CV characteristics can be either obtained
from datasheets, as shown in Fig. 6 for the 600-V 4-A PT
device, or measured experimentally, as shown in Fig. 7(a)(d)
for the other four devices.
The results of the parameter extraction procedure are shown
in Table II. The values of doping concentration and drift
region thickness appear reasonable for SiC and show fairly
similar design choices. Table III shows a comparison of the
FU et al.: PARAMETER EXTRACTION PROCEDURE FOR A PHYSICS-BASED POWER SiC SCHOTTKY DIODE MODEL
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Fig. 9. Corresponding comparisons of simulated (dashed lines) with experimental (solid lines) 1/C2 V characteristics of SiC Schottky diodes measured at
frequency = 1 MHz. (a) GeneSiC 1200 V, 3 A. (b) GeneSiC 1200, 7 A. (c) Cree 1200 V, 20 A. (d) GeneSiC 600 V, 50 A. (e) Cree 600 V, 4 A (estimated from
datasheet).
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FU et al.: PARAMETER EXTRACTION PROCEDURE FOR A PHYSICS-BASED POWER SiC SCHOTTKY DIODE MODEL
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VII. C ONCLUSION
The proposed parameter extraction procedure includes the
extraction of doping concentration, active area, and thickness
of the drift region, which are needed for the proposed physicsbased power Schottky diode model. The main advantage is
that this procedure does not require any knowledge of device
fabrication. The only measurements required for the parameter
extraction are simple static IV characterization and CV measurements. Validity of the approach is verified by comparison of
simulated and experimental results at temperatures from 25 C
to 175 C for five different devices from two different manufacturers. Inductive switching validation also shows that the model
provides a fairly good match with experiments. This shows that
the parameter extraction procedure and model presented in this
paper are generally applicable to SiC Schottky diodes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank GeneSiC Inc. for providing
some of the diodes used in this work.
R EFERENCES
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Kang Peng received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Hunan University, Changsha, China,
in 2008 and the M.S. degree in electrical engineering
from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 2011. He has been working
toward the Ph.D. degree at the University of South
Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA, since August 2011.
His research interests include power semiconductor device modeling and applications.