A fatigue-free silicon device structure

GERMANIUM DEVICES, when correctly used, are capable of essentially infinite life. It was commonly assumed in early higher temperature semiconductor work that silicon devices and those of other materials — such as SiC and the III-V compounds — would have similar life expectancy. However, among the early silicon applications, a number of installations were encountered where unusually high failure rates were recorded. A common feature of these installations was that there were present a large number of “off-on” operations each day.