Minority Charge Carrier Lifetime for Evaluating 4H-SiC Epitaxial Growth by Microwave Detected Photoconductivity Decay

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The quality of the epitaxial layer plays an important role in the performance of modern power electronic devices. Minority carrier lifetime is known to be sensitive to defects like dislocations, stacking faults, and points defects. Therefore, in this work lifetime measurements by microwave detected photoconductivity decay are used to evaluate the quality of the epitaxial layer on various 4H-SiC substrates from different vendors. The stability of the measurement technique is shown by a daily release measurement. This allows for a reliable analysis of almost 300 typical 1,200 V epilayer stacks. It has been shown that the effective lifetime of these samples can be separated into two different ranges. The lifetime values of about 120 ns fit to theoretical calculations. The cause for the increased lifetime of about 250 ns in the second range has yet to be determined in further research. Furthermore, the lifetime maps were used to locate defects in the surface near regions.

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15-19

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May 2026

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