The IMOSFET: A Deeply-Scaled Fully-Self-Aligned Trench MOSFET

Silicon Carbide (SiC) power MOSFETs have made great progress since the first commercial devices were introduced in 2011, but they are still far from theoretical limits of performance. Above ~1200 V the specific on-resistance is limited by the drift region, but below 1200 V the resistance is dominated by the channel and the substrate, with smaller contributions from the source and the JFET regions. Trench MOSFETs generally have smaller cell area than planar DMOSFETs and are inherently more scalable. In this paper, we describe a highly self-aligned fabrication process to realize deeply-scaled trench MOSFETs with a cell pitch of 0.5 μm per channel. Since the narrow gate trench is shaped like a letter “I”, we refer to these devices as “IMOSFETs.”