Electro-Thermal and Trapping Characterization of AlGaN/GaN RF Power HEMTs

Because the predictions of all types of AlGaN/GaN RF power HEMT device behavior, such as trapping and electro-thermal phenomena, are essential to develop CAD/CAE platforms useful for RF circuit design, this paper discusses some recent advances on device characterization techniques necessary to build accurate nonlinear equivalent-circuit models of this transistor technology. For that, a measurement methodology and instrumentation needed to guarantee isodynamic pulsed dc I/V characteristics and pulsed S-parameters is presented, and exemplifying results are shown.