FREQUENCY DOMAIN DYNAMIC THERMAL ANALYSIS IN GAAS HBT FOR POWER AMPLIFIER APPLICATIONS

Dynamic temperature distributions in GaAs HBT are numerically analyzed in frequency domain as a function of power dissipation, frequency and space. Complete thermal characteristics, including frequency-dependent thermal impedance and phase lag behavior, are presented. The analysis is also extended for arbitrary periodic or aperiodic pulse heating operation to predict junction temperature of a Power Amplifier (PA) with non-constant envelope input signal. Dynamic junction temperatures of a single finger 2 μm x 20 μm GaAs HBT are predicted for square pulse envelope signal input with power levels varying with up to 10 dB above a nominal average level of 40 mW and with pulse widths ranging from 10 ns to 100 μs. With the input envelope signal amplitude of 10 dB above the average, the analytical results show that junction temperature rises from room temperature of 27oC to 39oC when heated by 10 ns pulse, increase to 36oC by 100ns pulse, 105oC by 1μs pulse and to 198oC by 100 μs pulse. A novel setup is developed for nano-second pulsed measurements, and the analysis is validated through time domain on wafer pulsed measurements at three different power levels: 0 dB, 3 dB, and 6 dB above the average level. Results show that analytical results track well with measured junction temperature within the accuracy of ±5oC over the entire measurement set.