Safe operating area of GaAs MESFET for nonlinear applications

This paper provides a new approach to evaluate the transistor safe operating area for a nonlinear operation in the overdrive operating conditions. This approach has been implemented for a MESFET technology. The methodology consists in performing ON-state and OFF-state accelerated DC step stresses for bias conditions, which can be reached by V-DS and V-GS sweeps in the overdrive operating conditions. Hence, the results of an RF ageing test performed in nonlinear conditions have confirmed the methodology used in this paper.