The Response of Bipolar Transistors to Combined EMP and Ionization Environments

In many circuit applications, semiconductor junctions will be highly ionized when EMP induced voltage and current surges are applied to device terminals. This report presents results from a series of experiments which were performed to investigate the effect of high ionization rates (5 × 1011 rads (Si)/sec) on the pulsed current failure level of a bipolar transistor. Exposure of the devices to simultaneous EMP and ionization environments showed that the forward biased base emitter junction damage threshold was significantly lowered.