Preliminary, space focused, reliability tests on European GaN HEMTs

ESA is investing significant efforts towards developing a European, space qualified, GaN supply chain for microwave components. Numerous R&D projects have been completed, or are ongoing, that focus on areas such as epitaxial growth, transistor electrical performance and reliability enhancement, e.g. in projects such as GREAT2. In order to perform independent verification and validation, ESA has also begun to modernise and re-equip its microwave component laboratory to augment the well established materials and component test capabilities. This paper describes the laboratory capabilities and provides some preliminary results and lessons learned from performing high temperature storage, hydrogen poisoning and DC step stress tests on European sourced GaN samples.