Radiation Hardness Study of Silicon Carbide Sensors under High-Temperature Proton Beam Irradiations

Abstract

Silicon carbide (SiC), thanks to its material properties similar to diamond and its industrial maturity close to silicon, represents an ideal candidate for several harsh-environment sensing applications, where sensors must withstand high particle irradiation and/or high operational temperatures. In this study, to explore the radiation tolerance of SiC sensors to multiple damaging processes, both at room and high temperature, we used the Ion Microprobe Chamber installed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute (Zagreb, Croatia), which made it possible to expose small areas within the same device to different ion beams, thus evaluating and comparing effects within a single device. The sensors tested, developed jointly by STLab and SenSiC, are PIN diodes with ultrathin free-standing membranes, realized by means of a recently developed doping-selective electrochemical etching. In this work, we report on the changes of the charge transport properties, specifically in terms of the charge collection efficiency (CCE), with respect to multiple localized proton irradiations, performed at both room temperature (RT) and 500 °C.

Review—Silicon Carbide Thin Film Technologies: Recent Advances in Processing, Properties, and Applications: Part II. PVD and Alternative (Non-PVD and Non-CVD) Deposition Techniques

“…55 • Free-standing SiC membranes for sensing applications in harsh environments. 56 a-SiC.-S. Vry et al 55 studied the high-temperature pyrolysis of cross-linked Silres H62C methyl-phenyl-vinyl-hydrogen, primarily a highly branched polysiloxane (polysilsesquioxane), to yield a-SiC ceramic for incorporation in 3D-printing applications. The polysilsesquioxane was cross-linked starting at 180 °C by hydrosilylation between silyl groups (8.4% of the total functional groups) and vinyl groups (12.0% of the total functional groups), and included a nonnegligible ethoxy concentration (2.4% of the total functional groups).…”

“…They also observed that both the yield point and onset of plastic deformation in SiC increase by up to 77% when the SiC surface is coated with epitaxial graphene. SiC membranes.-E. Medina et al 56 explored the room and high-temperature (>400 °C) radiation tolerance of PIN diode sensors with ultrathin free-standing SiC membranes to multiple damaging processes using proton beams with MeV energies. The PIN diode sensors used consisted of a thin, 0.3 μm p + highly doped (10 18 cm −3 ) layer, and a 20 μm n − low-doped (10 14 cm −3 ) layer on top of a ∼370 μm-thick n + (10 18 cm −3 ) substrate.…”

First Characterization of Novel Silicon Carbide Detectors with Ultra-High Dose Rate Electron Beams for FLASH Radiotherapy

“…A first characterization of these free-standing membrane sensors, in terms of response as a function of the irradiation temperature and of the radiation damage, has been performed by using low energy proton microbeams (with 1.5 and 3.5 MeV) in the Division of Experimental Physics, Ruder Boškovic' Institute, showing promising radiation resistance tolerances [23].…”

A direct experimental comparison of single-crystal CVD diamond and silicon carbide X-ray beam position monitors

“…The 4H-SiC device consists of doped epitaxial layers grown on a 360 mm-thick n-doped substrate. The epitaxial layers consist of a 2 mm-thick n-nitrogen-doped and a 0.3 mm-thick p+ phosphorous-doped 4H-SiC (Medina et al, 2023;Nida et al, 2019). The substrate is partially removed creating a thinned-out 2.3 mm-thick central region, leaving the active nitrogen-doped and phosphorous-doped layers.…”

“…If the gaps between the quadrants are ignored, the root-mean-square variation was approximately 1.5% on the 4H-SiC, which is about three times greater than the sc-diamond. In more recent developments of the 4H-SiC this reduction in the thickness of the detecting region has been rectified as the p-doped layer is embedded in the n-doped region between quadrants so the thickness is constant across the gap (Medina et al, 2023).…”