ESD design of radiation-hardened for UV AlGaN focal plane arrays readout circuit

To meet the desire of radiation-hardened Electro-Static Discharge (ESD), a series of ESD protection devices and structures were proposed for ultraviolet (UV) AlGaN focal plane arrays (FPAs) readout circuit in this paper. The whole-chip ESD protection structures for I/O pads and power clamp (PC) pads fabricated in Global Foundries 0.35μm 2P4M mixed signal process are investigated. The structure-level and layout-level radiation hardened technologies are used to solve the problem of ESD current discharge efficiency and radiation hardened. Experimental results were obtained by transmission line pulse (TLP) testing system before and after the radiation hardening, it shows that the proposed ESD protection structures can reach the Human Body Model(HBM) ESD level to more than 4kV, while the total dose of ionizing radiation(TID) was 50krad (Si). Moreover, the whole chip ESD protection network are separated into logic ESD protection modules and analog ESD protection modules respectively to decrease crosstalk effect, and multi power clamp ESD protection devices are placed to improve the ESD current discharge efficiency.