The main issue in the development of power semiconductor devices
is to obtain the best trade-off between the specific
on-resistance
and the BV, and to shrink the feature size
without degrading device characteristics.
Although much effort has been put into the reduction of
while maintaining
the desired BV, it has been understood that there is a limit [125].
Recently, the super-junction (SJ) concept was suggested and studied, which achieved
a significant improvement in the trade-off between the on-resistance and
the BV compared to conventional devices [126,127,128,129,130,131,132].
Figure 3.11 shows the published
versus BV of four different device
structures and their theoretical limits [15,133]. Note that these
theoretical limits are only one part to estimate device performance,
it is mainly related to the cost of the devices. Other aspects, such as
parasitic capacitances, switching speed, thermal dissipation, and operation
temperature are not considered in Figure 3.11.
From this figure both SOI and super-junction structures have a best trade-off
between
and BV, and more improvements could yet be expected with the
development of manufacturing technology. The theoretical limits for
super-junction devices depend on the
- and
-column width of the drift region.
Violet lines show the theoretical limit for the super-junction (vertical) structure with
various column widths (2
2
5.0
m, 10.0
m, and 16.0
m, respectively), and lower
is obtained with smaller column width.
Doping concentration rises with decreasing column width, however, small columns
become more and more difficult to produce. Lateral super-junction combination
with SOI structure can be the one possible solution to overcome the process
difficulties.