TCAD-based investigation on transport properties of Diamond-like carbon coatings for HV-ICs

A TCAD-based approach is proposed to investigate the most relevant transport mechanisms of diamond-like carbon (DLC) films at different biases and ambient temperatures. Starting from the band structure and boundary conditions of a metal-insulator-metal (MIM) device, the most relevant trap levels have been determined against experiments along with the Poole-Frenkel conduction effect. The affinity of the DLC under study has been extracted from experiments on the corresponding metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) diode. A clear polarization effect has been found in the measured C-V curves at different frequencies. The latter has been modeled in the TCAD tool via the Debye equation leading to a nice agreement with experiments.