A comparison study of ESD protection for RFICs: performance vs. parasitics

This paper reports two advanced Electro-Static Discharge (ESD) protection structures suitable for RFICs and a comparison study of influences of ESD parasitic capacitance (C/sub ESD/) on high-speed circuits. For a 4 GHz ring-oscillator and a low-power high-speed op-amp circuits, it was observed that C/sub ESD/ may corrupt high-speed performance significantly and new ESD structures can recover the corruption by 80%.