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For more than two decades, silicon carbide (SiC) has been promoted as the key to developing extreme-environment electronics. Yet despite its promise, the field has remained stuck at the stage of basic research, failing to result in the development of practical devices. Now, a team of researchers at Kyoto University has set out to change that. "We believe the lack of development is because the research community has been trying to apply silicon-era thinking to a fundamentally different material," says Mitsuaki Kaneko first author of a new study published in APL Electronic Devices.

The team focused on junction field-effect transistors, also known as JFETs. Previous research has suggested that complementary JFETs, based on SiC JFETs, can be applied to low-power integrated circuits for operation in extreme environments. However, the JFETs that the researchers previously created—which had conventional top-gate structures fabricated in semi-insulating SiC substrates—suffered from low controllability and large leakage currents at high temperatures. This motivated the team to solve these two issues, which they knew would be essential for practical use.

"Our goal is to open a new path forward with complementary JFETs designed to harness the intrinsic properties of SiC itself," says Kaneko.

Rather than developing everything from scratch, the team deliberately employed industry-standard manufacturing methods to build its new JFET structure, adopting a bottom-gate design to improve threshold-voltage controllability. The researchers also employed well-based isolation instead of a semi-insulating substrate to suppress high-temperature leakage current.

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