Destructive Testing for Reliability Analysis at High-Power Microwave in GaAs/InGaP Hetero-Junction Bipolar Transistor

Abstract

The destructive testing for reliability analysis at high-power microwave (HPM) in the GaAs/InGaP hetero-junction bipolar transistor (HBT) has been rarely investigated although it has a significant impact on their performance and reliability against HPM. This paper employs the experimental measurements to study the HPM damage process. We first establish the experiment platform for injecting the HPM to the GaAs/InGaP HBT which has the P1dB output power of +15.5 dBm to acquire the damage threshold. It is found that with the increasing of the input power, the output waveforms are gradually distorted. In particular, when the input power increases to 45 dBm, the S parameters of the GaAs/InGaP HBT chip show that it is totally destroyed. The experiment results show that the damage threshold of the HBT decreases with the increase of the pulse width, and the decrease rate of the damage threshold gradually slowed down with the increases of pulse width. The damage threshold can be reduced by increasing the pulse number from 1 to 10.