Abstract-Analytical expressions for the electrothermal parameters governing thermal instability in bipolar transistors, i.e., thermal resistance TH , critical temperature crit and critical current C crit , are established and verified by measurements on silicon-on-glass bipolar NPNs. A minimum junction temperature increase above ambient due to selfheating that can cause thermal breakdown is identified and verified to be as low as 10-20 C.The influence of internal and external series resistances and the thermal resistance explicitly included in the expressions for crit and C crit becomes clear. The use of the derived expressions for determining the safe operating area of a device and for extracting the thermal resistance is demonstrated.

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