ESD-Reliability Analysis and Strategy of the GaN-Based Light-Emitting Diodes

Compounds such as GaN, ZnSe, and SiC are the compounds that currently hold the most potential in developing blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and blue laser diodes (LDs). Speaking of the physical property, the gallium nitride belongs to a direct bandgap material with an obviously super luminous efficiency; therefore, the gallium nitride has the dominate tendency than that of others materials. Although the gallium nitride has excellent physical properties, but in actually it is suffered many challenges during the manufacture process. Especially, it is extremely sensitive to the electrostatic discharge (ESD) threat. In other words GaN diodes generally exhibit very low anti-ESD capabilities when in HBM, MM reversed bias modes. These LEDs in the MM stress situation, its ESD immunity level usually is only about 50-V extremely low anti-ESD ability. Therefore, in this paper, GaN LED DUTs will be stressed and investigated under HBM and MM pulses bombardments, and the aim of this work is to describe a detailed investigation of the factors that limit the robustness of GaN-based LEDs under ESD transient events; finally they will provide some countermeasures in ESD reliability consideration.