Electrical characteristics of novel ESD protection devices for I/O and power clamp

This paper presents a novel silicon controlled rectifier (SCR)-based (Electrostatic Discharge) ESD protection devices for I/O clamp and power clamp. The proposed ESD protection devices has a high holding voltage and a low tigger voltage characteristic than conventional SCR. These characteristics enable to latch-up immune under normal operating conditions as well as superior full chip ESD protection. Also, the propsed devices can provide area efficiency in comparison to conventional (Gate Grounded NMOS) GGNMOS. The propsed devices are fabricated by using 0.35um BCD (Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS) technology. From the experimental results, the device for Input/Output (I/O) clamp has a trigger voltage of 6.5V, 7.7V and 8.1V with the LG1 of 0.5um, 0.8um and 1um, respectively. And the device for power clamp has a holding voltage of 8V, 10V and 11.3V with the D1 of 4.5um, 5.5um and 7um. Also, the device for I/O clamp has trigger voltage of 7.8V to 8.9V with the gate length (LG1) of 0.5um, 0.8um and 1.0um. Moreover, The proposed devices have high ESD robustness.

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