of the present invention thus the following description is provided as illustrative of the principles of the present invention and not in limitation thereof since the scope of the present invention is defined by the claims junction termination extension jte is one of several passivation techniques used with power semiconductor devices to prevent breakdown due to field line crowding at the periphery of the active area of the device all semiconductor power devices have passivation of some kind device performance e g higher breakdown voltage can be significantly improved using proper jte procedures and the fabrication of junction termination extensions that have graded implant concentrations as one moves away from the active region of a semiconductor device by graded it is meant that the concentration of implanted dopant atoms i e the number of atoms cm 3 decreases with distance from the periphery of the active region this grading is produced by using a mask set for implantation that has patterns of different shape and size according to the distance from the edge of the device active area all of the remaining device area adjacent to the active area is not implanted rather only selected portions of the remaining area that are exposed by the openings in the mask set implantation is carried out at several different energies with one or more doses at each energy however all of the open patterns in the mask set are implanted identically a graded concentration is then achieved by heating the sample usually silicon to diffuse the implanted species the combination of diffusion and the pattern of the open areas in.