Study of electromagnetic field stress impact on AlGaN/GaN HEMT transistor performances

AlGaN/GaN HEMTs are tremendous interest in applications requiring high power at microwave frequencies. In the context of studying the reliability of RF High Power Amplifiers (HPA) in their real environment, a study of the effect of electromagnetic stress on AlGaN / GaN HEMTs performances is presented in this paper. The near field setup is used to disturb with electromagnetic field the device under test (DUT). Degradations in DC and power characteristics are observed. They are induced by thermal and trapping process. A relaxation phenomenon was observed after stopping the stress.