Best Paper Award for Mauro Ciappa and Marco Pocaterra
Mauro Ciappa and Marco Pocaterra of the Integrated Systems Laboratory received the Best Paper Award (first out of 174 candidates) at the 31st European Symposium on Reliability of Electron Devices, Failure Physics and Analysis (ESREF 2020) that took place in Athens, Greece, from 4 to 8 October, 2020.
Their contribution is titled On the use of soft gamma radiation to characterize the pre-breakdown carrier multiplication in SiC power MOSFETs and its correlation to the TCR failure rate as measured by neutron irradiation.
In the awarded work, an original technique is demonstrated, which makes use of collimated radioactive sources to sense the electric field inside wide band gap power devices. This approach has interesting practical implications, in particular for the characterization of the susceptibility of power semiconductors to catastrophic failure mechanisms, as those caused by terrestrial cosmic rays.
The paper will be presented as an invited contribution at the 59th IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS 2021) held in Monterey, USA, in April 2021.