Degradation Behavior and Analysis of GaN HEMTs Under High Power Microwave Pulse

Abstract

In this work, the effect of electromagnetic pulses on the performance of AlGaN/GaN HEMTs was studied, by building a high-power microwave pulse (HPM) experimental platform. Repeated experiments with multiple devices show that the electrical characteristics of the devices changed after HPM stress. In order to reduce the impact of device recovery, the data of 4 hours after stress are selected for analysis. The experimental results show that the gate leakage current is reduced by an order of magnitude, and the transfer and output characteristic curve changes, the threshold voltage has a 0.25V positive shift after stress. Moreover, in the process of measuring the S-parameters of the devices, TRL calibration kits were designed to de-embed, and the measurement results show that the S-parameters of device have changed significantly. In addition, it is found that defects are a major factor in degradation. As current high-integration chips are susceptible to electromagnetic pulses, this experiment may provide useful reference for RF device design.