The Safe Operating Area of GaAs-Based Heterojunction Bipolar Transistors

The safe operating area (SOA) of GaAs-based heterojunction bipolar transistors has been studied considering both the self-heating effect and the breakdown effect. The Kirk effect induced breakdown (KIB) was considered to account for the decrease of the breakdown voltage at high currents. With reasonable emitter ballastors, the KIB effect was shown to be the major cause for device failure at high currents, while the thermal effect controls the low current failure. The effect of emitter resistance and base resistance on device stability was also studied. While the emitter resistance always improves the device stability by expanding the SOAs, the base resistance degrades SOAs when the KIB dominates the failure mechanism. The effect of the base resistance on SOAs was explained by its control on the flow of the avalanche current. Since the KIB effect depends on the collector structure, it was shown that a nonuniformly doped collector can effectively improve the SOAs