Kazuhiro Mochizuki on his book on vertical GaN and SiC power semiconductor devices

My book, Vertical GaN and SiC Power Devices published by Artech House, is intended to provide a comparative introduction to vertical GaN and SiC power semiconductor devices for students, researchers, and engineers working in the field of crystal growth, processing, and design for power semiconductor devices.

Photon recycling

The emphasis is partly on photon recycling, which is important for increasing not only effective carrier lifetime but also ionization ratio of deep acceptors. Photon recycling in GaN is attributable to very large peripheral current flowing through non-self-aligned mesa-type p-n junctions. This phenomenon has not been described in any textbooks, since forward current flowing through p-n junctions has been treated one-dimensionally only.

Schottky junctions

In addition, all the textbooks on GaN and SiC power semiconductor devices inadequately describe Schottky junctions; namely, they describe thermionic emission as a limiting process on current transport even though electron mobility becomes quite low under a high electric field. As described in my book, diffusion is more important, especially when electron mobility is reduced by ion-implantation-induced damage or phonon scattering at elevated temperature.

Power-switching devices

Among unipolar power-switching devices, superjunction power-switching devices are expected to have the lowest specific on-resistance around a breakdown voltage of 6.5 kV. Since trench-filling epitaxy is indispensable for fabricating superjunction devices, trench-filling mechanisms are explained for the first time among the textbooks on semiconductor devices.

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Other topics that have not been covered in previous textbooks on power semiconductor devices include the following: comparison of vertical and lateral power-semiconductor devices based on reported results, modeling of aluminum and boron profiles in SiC, GaN bipolar-junction transistors, and comparison of junction terminations and reliability of vertical GaN and SiC power devices.

Article author and bio: Kazuhiro Mochizuki, author of Vertical GaN and SiC Power Devices. He is affiliated with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan. Previously he was involved in the research of GaN and SiC power devices at the Central Research Laboratory, Hitachi Ltd., Tokyo, Japan.  He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of the Japan Society of Applied Physics.  He is also a lecturer at the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan and Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan.  He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in electronic engineering from the University of Tokyo, Japan.

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