Article PreviewArticle PreviewArticle PreviewWe present a novel approach based on conductive atomic force microscopy (c-AFM) for nano-scale mapping of the Schottky barrier height (SBH) between a semiconductor and an ultrathin (1-5 nm) metal film. The method was applied to characterize the uniformity of the Au/4H-SiC Schottky contact, which is attractive for applications due to the high reported (∼ 1.8 eV) SBH value. Since this system is very sensitive to the SiC surface preparation, we investigated the effect on the nano-scale SBH distribution of a∼ 2 nm thick not uniform SiO2 layer. The macroscopic IV characteristics on Au/SiC and Au/not uniform SiO2/SiC diodes showed that the interfacial oxide lowers the average SBH. The c-AFM investigation is carried out collecting arrays of IV curves for different tip positions on 1μm× 1μm area. From these curves, 2D SBH maps are obtained with 10-20 nm spatial …