Analysis of an ESD failure mechanism on a SiC MESFET

Efficient energy management become more and more crucial with increasing energy resource scarcity. Power electronic will play a major role in this field and thus require innovations like using wide band gap semiconductor to build power devices. SiC, GaN, diamond material-based devices are currently more or less mature and will sooner or later require investigations on their reliability to allow their wide adoption. In this work we investigate on the robustness of a SiC-MESFET to ElectroStatic-Discharge (ESD). Surprisingly the ESD robustness is rather low and found to be related to both current non-uniformity and a quite unexpected parasitic NPN bipolar transistor triggering. The outcome of this study allows proposing first guidelines to optimize ESD robustness of such devices.