Investigation on ESD Robustness of 1200-V D-Mode GaN MIS-HEMTs with HBM ESD Test and TLP Measurement

The component-level ESD robustness of 1200-V D-Mode (depletion-mode) GaN (gallium nitride) MIS-HEMTs (metal insulator semiconductor-high electron mobility transistor) was investigated in this work. Experimental results showed that HBM levels were poor in the testing condition with HBM ESD zapping from Gate to Source, even if the device size was as large as 120000 mu m. Further studies on the correlation between TLP failure currents and HBM ESD levels were conducted. It was found that HBM ESD test was the suitable method to evaluate the ESD immunity instead of TLP measurement owing to the miscorrelation between TLP failure currents and HBM ESD levels.