Towards Silicon Carbide VLSI Circuits for Extreme Environment Applications

• A Process Design Kit (PDK) has been developed to realize complex integrated circuits in Silicon Carbide (SiC) bipolar low-power technology. The PDK development process included basic device modeling, and design of gate library and parameterized cells. A transistor–transistor logic (TTL)-based PDK gate library design will also be discussed with delay, power, noise margin, and fan-out as main design criterion to tolerate the threshold voltage shift, beta (β) and collector current (IC) variation of SiC devices as temperature increases. The PDK-based complex digital ICsdesign flow based on layout, physical verification, and in-house fabrication process will also be demonstrated. Both combinational and sequential circuits have been designed, such as a 720-device ALU and a 520-device 4 bit counter. All the integrated circuits and devices are fully characterized up to 500 °C. The inverter and a D-type flip-flop (DFF) are characterized as benchmark standard cells. The proposed work is a key step towards SiC-based very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits implementation for high-temperature applications.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Process Design Kit (PDK); bipolar logic gates; high temperature digital integrated circuits (ICs); transistor–transistor logic (TTL); SiC bipolar transistor; SiC VLSI Circuits

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)