Effects of combined NO and forming gas annealing on interfacial properties and oxide reliability of 4H-SiC MOS structures

The effects of NO and forming gas post oxidation annealing treatments on the interfacial properties and reliability of thermal oxides grown on n-type 4H-SiC (0001) Si face have been investigated in this study. The results show that forming gas annealing (FGA) treatment has limited effect on interface trap density (D_it) while it results in an improvement of the insulating properties of thermal oxide with uniform high FN barrier height (2.56 eV), high field-to-breakdown (10.71 MV/cm) and charge-to-breakdown (0.078 C/cm²). On the other hand, NO annealing causes a drastic reduction in D_it in the entire energy level, but in the case of reliability, it is not so effective as FGA, with lower barrier height (2.52 eV), field-to-breakdown (10.08 MV/cm), charge-to-breakdown (0.025 C/cm²) and worse uniformity of oxide. The combined NO&FGA treatment was also studied. It leads to a significant reduction in interface trap density further, especially in deep energy level (E_C-E_T ≥ 0.4 eV). As for reliability, it brings about uniform barrier height (2.69 eV), field-to-breakdown (10.15 MV/cm) and charge-to-breakdown (0.024 C/cm²). Taking interfacial properties and reliability into account, combined NO&FGA treatment is a promising POA technique for fabrication of high-quality SiC MOS devices.