Reliability of GaN HEMTs: current status and future technology

Testing the Temperature Limits of GaN-Based HEMT Devices

“…• C [8], [10], [16]. However, early experiments had also already indicated that the failure of the devices could be due to the degradation of the heterostructure rather than the gate diode [32].…”

“…These have been rather low in the beginning (0.38 eV [15]) and mostly related to the high material dislocation and defect density. However, the material quality has been improved essentially and steadily, and recent experiments have indicated activation energies of up to around 3 eV [16], [17], indicating extremely long lifetimes under normal operating conditions and making the extraction of an activation energy already difficult.…”

Electrical and structural degradation of GaN high electron mobility transistors under high-power and high-temperature Direct Current stress

“…An extensive amount of research has been devoted to studying the reliability of GaN HEMTs under various stress regimes such as ON-state, OFFstate, and V DS ¼ 0 V state. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] Several mechanisms have been postulated to explain the various degradation patterns that have been observed. [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] Several studies [19][20][21][22][23][24][25] have shown the appearance of prominent physical damage (dimples, grooves, pits, trenches, and cracks) on the semiconductor surface under the edge of the gate after prolonged OFF-state stress.…”

Time evolution of electrical degradation under high-voltage stress in GaN high electron mobility transistors

“…High-voltage stress has been found to result in device degradation with a critical voltage behavior [1][2] and characterized by trap formation and trapping [3][4]. To date, few studies have investigated the time evolution of degradation under high-voltage stress conditions [3,[5][6][7][8]. Some of these studies focused on the evolution of the gate/drain leakage current [6,8].…”