The impact of non-ideal ohmic contacts on the performance of high-voltage SIC MPS diodes

The wide band gap of SiC semiconductor devices constitutes a serious challenge to build good Ohmic contacts on the surface of the p-type material. This is reflected in the numerical analysis of ”realistic” devices, where we have to cope with serious problems, such as a shifting threshold voltage, reduced forward conductivity, and no noticeable conductivity modulation by minority carrier injection from p⁺-emitters, in matching measured data with simulation results, as a consequence of the significant impact of non-ideal poor Ohmic contacts. In this work, we used a Schottky contact model together with a barrier tunneling model, instead of the common ideal Ohmic contact model, in order to simulate the non-ideal Ohmic contact on SiC MPS diodes. Based on this approach, the I-V characteristics of real Ohmic contacts can be reproduced in high-fidelity simulations, providing us physical explanations of the observed operational behavior.