High temperature silicon carbide FETs for radiation environments

Silicon carbide (SiC) is a very promising semiconductor material for the development of electronics that will operate at high temperature; it has the additional advantage that for some applications it should be less sensitive to radiation than Si or GaAs. There will be advantages to eventually using SiC to build very radiation-resistant, high-temperature circuits, which could be located near or within severe radiation environments. System benefits would come from development of circuits with sensor amplifier/multiplexer and control signal demultiplexer/motor drive electronics functions. The goal of our research is ultimately to demonstrate that high-temperature radiation-hardened circuits can be built to meet the kinds of needs discussed above, In this paper we report on the operation of state of the art SiC JFETs over a wide temperature range and in severe radiation environments. These devices represent the current state of the art but do not represent the limits of operation of SiC semiconductor devices. This work was in fact carried out to increase our understanding of the device characteristics so as to allow the design of new SiC circuits which could meet the extremely stressful requirements of nuclear power systems.