Analysis of an ESD failure mechanism on a SiC MESFET

Tanguy Phulpin (1) , David Trémouilles (1) , Karine Isoird (1) , Dominique Tournier (2) , Philippe Godignon (2) , Patrick Austin (1)

1 LAAS-ISGE - Équipe Intégration de Systèmes de Gestion de l'Énergie
2 EE - Ampère, Département Energie Electrique

Efficient energy management become more and more crucial with increasing energy resource scarcity. Power electronic will play a major role in this field and thus require innovations like using wide band gap semiconductor to build power devices. SiC, GaN, diamond material-based devices are currently more or less mature and will sooner or later require investigations on their reliability to allow their wide adoption. In this work we investigate on the robustness of a SiC-MESFET to ElectroStatic-Discharge (ESD). Surprisingly the ESD robustness is rather low and found to be related to both current non-uniformity and a quite unexpected parasitic NPN bipolar transistor triggering. The outcome of this study allows proposing first guidelines to optimize ESD robustness of such devices.

Mots clés: SiC MESFET ESD HBM TLP reliability improvements robustness parasitic transistor

Domaines: Electronique

Tanguy Phulpin, David Trémouilles, Karine Isoird, Dominique Tournier, Philippe Godignon, et al.. Analysis of an ESD failure mechanism on a SiC MESFET. Microelectronics Reliability, 2014, pp.MR11331. ⟨10.1016/j.microrel.2014.07.134⟩. ⟨hal-01059962⟩