Influence of epilayer thickness and structural defects on the minority carrier lifetime in 4H-SiC

4H-SiC homoepitaxial layers with different thicknesses from 12.5 µm up to 50 µm were investigated by microwave-detected photoconductivity decay (µ-PCD), deep level transient spectroscopy (DLTS) and defect selective etching (DSE) to shed light on the influence of the epilayer thickness and structural defects on the effective minority carrier lifetime. It is shown that the effective lifetime, resulting directly from the µ-PCD measurement, is significantly influenced by the surface recombination lifetime. Therefore, an adequate correction of the measured data is necessary to determine the bulk lifetime. The bulk lifetime of these epilayers is in the order of several microseconds. Furthermore, areas with high dislocation density are correlated to areas with locally reduced effective lifetime.