A study on GaAs FET's failure mechanism and experimental technology of rapid evaluation of reliability

A new evaluation method is proposed in this paper based on the temperature characteristic of I/sub DSS/ which is a sensitive parameter to the failure of GaAs FETs and the degradation characteristics of devices under electrothermal stress. With this new method we can extract information on the relationship between degradation of I/sub DSS/ and temperature rapidly and on line. Reliability parameters of GaAs FETs can be determined rapidly, such as the activation energy to failure Q.