This book is focused on the most important and the less summarized reliability
aspects. Among them: catastrophic failures, impact of local structural inhomogeneities,
major principles of physical limitation of safe-operating area (SOA),
physical mechanisms of the current instability, filamentation and conductivity
modulation in particular device types and architectures.
Specifically, the similar principles and regularities are discussed for electrostatic
discharge (ESD) protection devices, treating them as a particular case of
pulsed power devices. Thus both the most intriguing applications and reliability
problems in case of the discrete and the integrated components are covered in
this book.