A new degradation mode for heterojunction bipolar transistors under reverse-bias stress

A new degradation behavior for heterojunction bipolar transistors under reverse base-emitter junction stress is presented and discussed. Hot carrier injection triggered a correlated decrease of both the base and collector-currents in the first stress-time steps. Both experiments and simulations show that this degradation is linked to the stress-induced suppression of initially present excess ideal components for both currents