Dual material insulator SOI-LDMOSFET: A novel device for self-heating effect improvement

The silicon-on-insulator (SOI) power devices show good electrical performance but they suffer from inherent self-heating effect (SHE), which limits their operation at high current levels. The SHE effect is because of low thermal conductivity of the buried oxide layer. In this paper we propose a novel silicon on insulator lateral double diffused MOSFET (SOI-LDMOSFET) where the buried insulator layer under the active region consists of two materials in order to decrease the SHE. The proposed structure is called dual material buried insulator SOI-LDMOSFET (DM-SOI). Using two-dimensional and two-carrier device simulation, we demonstrate that the heat dissipation and the SHE can be improved in a conventional SOI-LDMOSFET by replacement of the buried oxide with dual material buried insulator (silicon nitride and silicon oxide) beneath the active region. The heat generated in the active silicon layer can be flowed through the buried silicon nitride layer to the silicon substrate easily due to high thermal conductivity of silicon nitride. Furthermore, the channel temperature is reduced, negative drain current slope is mitigated and electron and hole mobility is increased during high-temperature operation. The simulated results show that silicon nitride is a suitable alternative to silicon dioxide as a buried insulator in SOI structures, and has better performance in high temperature. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.