Qualification of 50 V GaN on SiC technology for RF power amplifiers

•The way how NXP qualifies it’s GaN power products is described.•Extrapolated operating life time of NXP’s GaN products is at least as good as of its competitors.•Challenges with AuSn die attach have been solved.

This paper describes the qualification of the 50 V, 0.5 μm GaN on SiC process that has been released at the III–V fab of UMS in Ulm in cooperation with IAF and NXP Semiconductors. The qualification at NXP is split into two parts: Part 1: investigation of die related wear-out failure mechanisms using a power device with 7.2 mm gate width and Part 2: final process release using the first product of NXP, a 50 W wide band amplifier. The aim of the first part is to determine the acceleration factors for the major electric failure mechanism. These will be then used to define the qualification program of the wide band amplifier which will also include all package related tests. In this paper we will show how the tests are defined using the mission profile of the product. In addition, we will show the results. They are compared to results published in literature and are shown to be very promising.