Reliable electron bombarded semiconductor power devices

During the earlier development of EBS devices, degradation mechanisms imposed severe limitations on achievable performance and operating life. Essentially all of the difficulties have been overcome and a number of devices have now operated for many thousands of hours at high average power with no failures. The objective of the work described in this paper was to determine the various failure modes in electron bombarded semiconductor devices, to design diode configurations which eliminate the known degradation mechanisms, to test diodes for reliable operation under electron bombardment, and to develop compatible semiconductor and vacuum tube processing methods. The life tests verify that the effort was successful.