In September 1995, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) established a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program on Manufacturable Power Switching Devices. This program is a partnership involving four universities, Purdue University, the University of Texas at Austin, Howard University, and Rensselear Polytechnic Institute, and one industrial partner, Cree Research, Inc. Our objective is to develop power switching devices in the wide bandgap (WBG) semiconductors SiC and GaN for use in future military and civilian systems.

The principal investigator for this MURI program is Prof. James A. Cooper of Purdue University, and the program administrator is Dr. John Zolper of the Office of Naval Research. They can be contacted at the addresses below:

Prof. James A. Cooper, Jr. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Purdue University 1285 EE Building West Lafayette, IN 47907-1285 (765) 494-3514 Fax: 494-6441 e-mail: cooperj@ecn.purdue.edu WWW site: http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/WBG/

Dr. John C. Zolper Office of Naval Research Electroncs Division 800 North Quincy Street Arlington, VA 22217-5660 (703) 696-1437 Fax: 696-2611 e-mail: zolperj@onr.navy.mil WWW site: http://www.onr.navy.mil/

The following are PowerPoint-style presentations describing our program.

Program Overview (13 slides)

A summary of the MURI power device development program and an overview of accomplishments to date. Particularly important are significant advances in power MOSFET performance, with blocking voltages as high as 2.6 kV and figures-of-merit as much as 25x higher than the silicon theoretical limit.

SiC Schottky Rectifier Development (8 slides)

Since SiC Schottky diodes do not store significant minority carrier charge in the conducting state, their turn-off transient is very fast. This reduces switching losses in circuits driving inductive loads by about a factor of 4 compared to silicon PiN diodes. For high-frequency systems, the switching loss can be the dominant energy loss in the system. This presentation describes high-performance SiC Schottky diodes made under this MURI.

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