Experimental Investigation and Model Analysis on a GaN Electrostatic Discharge Clamp

This work carried out the experimental investigation and model analysis on a GaN electrostatic discharge (ESD) clamp, which features a discharge high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) and a voltage divider formed by a lateral field effect rectifier (L-FER) chain and a resistor in series. Firstly, it is found through the experimental investigation, the turn-on voltage ( $V_{\mathrm {T}}$ ) of GaN ESD clamp’s static current is increased with the increase in L-FER’s number and the decrease in resistor’s value. Then, an analytical model is proposed to analyze the dependence of $V_{\mathrm {T}}$ on L-FER’s number and resistor’s value. And the analytical model exhibits a good consistency with the experimentally measured results, which confirms the validity of the presented analytical model. Lastly, the dependence of GaN ESD clamp’s transmission line pulsing characteristics on the L-FER’s number and resistor’s value is also analyzed. Similarly, GaN ESD clamp’s triggering voltage is also increased with the increase in L-FER’s number and the decrease in resistor’s value. The experimental investigation and model analysis of this work can be used to direct the design of GaN ESD clamp, and help to save a lot of manpower, material resources and time costs.