Modeling and Design Guidelines for ${\rm P}^{+}$ Guard Rings in Lightly Doped CMOS Substrates

This paper presents a compact model for P+ guard rings in lightly doped CMOS substrates featuring a P-well layer. Simple expressions for the impedances in the model are derived based on a conformal mapping approach. The model can be used to predict the noise suppression performance of P+ guard rings in terms of S-parameters, which is useful for substrate noise mitigation in mixed-signal system-on-chips. Validation of the model has been done by both electromagnetic simulation and experimental results from guard rings implemented using a standard 0.18- μm CMOS process. In addition, design guidelines have been drawn for minimizing the guard ring size while maintaining the noise suppression performance.

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