A Systematic Study of ESD Protection Co-Design With High-Speed and High-Frequency ICs in 28 nm CMOS

This paper discusses a systematic study of electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection circuit co-design and analysis technique for high-frequency and high-speed ICs in 28 nm CMOS. The comprehensive ESD-IC co-design flow includes ESD device optimization and characterization, ESD behavioral modeling, backend interconnect characterization, parasitic ESD parameter extraction, ESD failure analysis and ESD co-design evaluation for ICs operating at up to 15 GHz and 40 Gbps. Ring oscillator, dummy I/O buffer and current mode logic (CML) circuits were used to demonstrate the co-design method. This practical ESD-IC co-design technique can be applied to high-performance, high-frequency and high-speed ICs.