Product-level reliability of GaN devices

To enable the widespread adoption of GaN products, the industry needs to be convinced of product-level reliability. The difficulty with product-level reliability lies with the diverse range of products and use conditions, a limited ability for system-level acceleration, and the complication from non-GaN system failures. For power management applications, however, it is possible to identify fundamental switching transitions. This allows the device to be qualified in an application-relevant manner. In this paper, we explain how hard-switching can form a fundamental switching transition for power management products. We further show that the familiar double-pulse tester is a good hard-switching qualification test vehicle. The methodology is explained in the context of the existing qualification framework for silicon transistors.