GaAs HBT Reliability
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Yeats, B.; Low, T. S.; Alt, K.; Adamski, M. E.; Bonse, M.; D'Avanzo, D. C.; Dvorak, M.; Hutchinson, C. P.; Iwamoto, M.; Kellert, F. G.; Kuhn, D. K.; Shimon, R. L.; Shirley, T. E.
- Source
- 2008 IEEE Compound Semiconductor Integrated Circuits Symposium Compound Semiconductor Integrated Circuits Symposium, 2008. CSIC '08. IEEE. :1-4 Oct, 2008
- Subject
- Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Photonics and Electrooptics
Gallium arsenide
Heterojunction bipolar transistors
Passivation
Failure analysis
Instruments
Circuits
Materials reliability
Material properties
Acceleration
Temperature
- Language
- ISSN
- 1550-8781
2374-8443
We discuss the many factors affecting the reliability of GaAs HBTs that we have encountered starting from the early days of AlGaAs-emitter HBTs through the present day use of InGaP-emitter HBTs. We discuss both wearout and infancy failure modes and try to distinguish fundamental (i.e., unavoidable) from nonfundamental failure modes. We have found that infant failures are dominated by substrate dislocation density, which can limit long-term-reliable circuit sizes to under ~1000 transistors.