Monolithically Integrated Bidirectional Gate ESD Protection Scheme of p-GaN Power HEMT by Dual-Gate Device Technology

This letter proposes a monolithically integrated bidirectional gate electrostatic discharge protection scheme for p-GaN power high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs), in which a dual-gate HEMT is designed as the discharging transistor. With this protection scheme, the forward/reverse transmission line pulsing failure current is enhanced from 0.156 A/0.08 A to 1.36 A/5.26 A, almost without sacrificing performances of the p-GaN power HEMT. Thanks to the bidirectional switching characteristics of the dual-gate device by sharing the drift region, only one discharging transistor is required in the scheme; as a result, the area of this protection scheme can be effectively saved by 40.8% compared to state-of-the-art scheme with the same protection capability.