The Silicon Carbide MOS Capacitor

Only a few years after the invention of the transistor, William Shockley declared silicon carbide (SiC) an excellent material for high temperature semiconductor devices. In fact, he predicted that it would be the most important electronic material to follow silicon. Furthermore, since SiC has the ability to grow thermal silicon dioxide, this would seem to be the ideal material for a high temperature metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET). However, over a half century later, SiC technology has yet to attain widespread use in commercial electronic devices. This is due to number of significant hurdles mainly the relatively high cost and difficulty of creating high quality SiC materials and its thermal SiO2 films. In this work, quality of the SiC/SiO2 system is studied using a simple structure, the metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) capacitor. Well developed methods, such as the pulsed MOS capacitor technique, are applied extensively to this device. This work is particularly valuable for graduate students, professors, electrical engineers, and scientists working to make the SiC MOSFET a reality.