The ESD Handbook

22ESD in GaAs

22.1 Gallium Arsenide Technology and ESD

Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) technology has been pervasive in semiconductor technology where power, speed, and reliability are necessary [1–9]. Gallium Arsenide has advantages over other competing technologies, such as RF CMOS, and RF Silicon Germanium due to its performance [5]. Today, Gallium Arsenide technology dominates telecommunications, optical interconnect systems, cell phones, as well as space and military applications in the sectors where performance is needed [6–9]. Because reliability is important in these applications, electrostatic discharge (ESD) has been an issue since the early usage of GaAs semiconductor products [9–39]. Additionally, gallium-based and indium-based technologies [33, 40–62] have also gained interest in the area of reliability and ESD protection [33, 40–48]. Today, ESD protection is being pursued from on-chip ESD power clamps, on-chip spark gaps and field emission devices (FEDs), separate GaAs ESD chips [9], to off-chip protection surge protection devices [51, 52].

22.2 Gallium Arsenide Energy-to-Failure, and Power-to-Failure

The power-to-failure of RF Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) MESFETs over a wide range of pulse widths was of interest for microwave and military applications. Early work on the power-to-failure models of GaAs MESFETs focused on the power-to-failure as a function of the pulse width from 1 to 10 nanosecond time scales [10–15]. The power-to-failure of the GaAs MESFETs under these ...