A Critical Review on Reliability and Short Circuit Robustness of Silicon Carbide Power MOSFETs

Superior electrical and physical properties of SiC (Silicon Carbide) make them ideal for various high voltage, high frequency and high power electronic applications. When compared to GaAs and GaN, the advantage of SiC is that its natural oxide is SiO 2 and is used as the gate-dielectric in SiC MOSFETs. Better performance of SiC Power MOSFETs has made it as an ideal substitute to its Si counterpart. Even though the performance of SiC Power MOSFETs has improved significantly over recent years (breakdown voltage over 3300 V [144], field effect channel mobility over 160 cm 2 /Vs (Cabello et al. in Appl Phys Lett 111, 2017), specific on state resistance as low as 1.63 mΩ.cm 2 (Fu et al. in Microelectron Reliab 123, 2021) and short circuit withstand time over 80 µS (Wang et al. in IEEE Trans Power Electron 31:1555–1566, 2016)), reliability issues due to the presence of near interface oxide defects and degradation due to poor quality of interface and gate dielectric is its major drawback. In this article we have extensively studied various reliability and stability issues that affect the performance of Silicon Carbide Power MOSFETs. The short-circuit behaviour and robustness of various SiC Power MOSFETs were also discussed.