Thermal, electrical and environmental reliability of InP HEMTs and GaAs PHEMTs

This paper reviews current understanding of reliability of InP HEMTs and GaAs PHEMTs. Operating temperature, bias point, and the environment are all known to affect the long-term stability of these devices. Identifying the dominant failure mechanism in a given situation is difficult because fundamental understanding is still insufficient, several mechanisms have a similar signature, and because often times, there are multiple mechanisms acting simultaneously. In spite of this, GaAs PHEMTs and InP HEMTs are already remarkably reliable and the prospect of further improvements are good.