Aging Investigation of NbN Hot Electron Bolometer Mixer

Other conference contribution, 2005

This work presents the aging investigation of NbN HEB mixers in usual lab conditions and also in high temperature and high relative humidity environment. A variety of devices have been fabricated using different combinations of resist (SAL), Si, SiO2 and SiN single and multi-layer for bolometer protection. In the accelerated aging tests the degradation is monitored by measuring the DC resistance of the devices during the test. The results show that using multi-layer protection increase the device lifetime significantly.