Electrostatic and Electrical Overstress Damage in Silicon Mosfet Devices and Gaas Mesfet Structures

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of the semiconductor industry, in recent years, has been the spectacular reduction in component size. The (basically financial) forces which continue to fuel this process have also brought about several technological advances. The reduction in transit time which results from reduced component size has led to improved gains and switching times [e.g. 1]. Smaller components require less external circuitry and, because internal circuitry is more reliable, more components may be interconnected with an associated increase in the complexity of the tasks performable by an integrated circuit. Larger memories are available for the same size of chip, thus manufacturers of, for example, Workstations and Minicomputers are able to increase their built-in RAM capacity with no loss of space. Of course, miniaturisation has also compounded some long standing problems. Some of the failure mechanisms which beset large scale integrated (LSI) circuits are magnified in the very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuits available today.