Abstract
It has been reported that the failure phenomenon and variation of electrical characteristic due to the effect of electrostatic discharge(ESD) in silicon devices. But we had fess reports about the phenomenon due to the ESD in the compound semiconductors. So there are a lot of difficulty to the phenomenon analysis and to select the protection method of main circuits or the devices. It has not been reported that the relation between the ESD stress and GaN devices, which is remarkable to apply the operation in high temperature and high voltage due to the superior material characteristic. We studied that the characteristic variation of the AlGaN/GaN HEMT current, the leakage current, the transconductance(gm) and the failure phenomenon of device due to the ESD stress. We have applied the ESD stress by transmission line pulse(TLP) method, which is widely used in ESD stress experiments, and observed the variation of the electrical characteristic before and after applying the ESD stress. The on-current trended to increase after applying the ESD stress. The leakage current and transconductance were changed slightly. The failure point of device was mainly located in middle and edge sides of the gate, was considered the increase of temperature due to a leakage current. The GaN devices have poor thermal characteristic due to usage of the sapphire substrate, so it have been shown to easily fail at low voltage compared to the conventional GaAs devices.
