Effect of annealing temperature on the electrical characteristics of Platinum/4H-SiC Schottky barrier diodes

Pt/4H-SiC Schottky barrier diodes have been fabricated to investigate the effect of annealing on the electrical characteristics of the fabricated devices. The parameters such as barrier height, ideality factor and donor concentration were deduced from the current-voltage (I-V) and the capacitance-voltage (C-V) measurements at room temperature. Diodes showed non-ideal behaviour like high value of ideality factor and lower value of barrier height. A barrier height of 1.82 eV was obtained from C-V measurements and it was 1.07 eV when obtained from the I-V measurements with ideality factor 1.71 for as-deposited diodes at room temperature. The diodes, therefore, were annealed in the temperature range from 25 degrees C to 400 degrees C to observe the effect of annealing temperature on these parameters. Schottky barrier height and ideality factors were found to be temperature-dependent. After rapid thermal annealing upto 400 degrees C, a barrier height of 1.59 eV from C-V measurements and the value of 1.40 eV from I-V measurements with ideality factor 1.12 were obtained. Barrier heights deduced from C-V measurements were consistently larger than those obtained from I-V measurements. To come to terms with this discrepancy, we re-examined our results by including the effect of ideality factor in the expression of the barrier height. This inclusion of ideality factor results in reasonably good agreement between the values of barrier height deduced by the above two methods. We believe that these improvements in the electrical parameters result from the improvement in the quality of interfacial layer.