A compact and low leakage current dual-direction SCR based ESD protection device

Dual-directional silicon-controlled rectifiers (DDSCRs) are attractive for bidirectional ESD protection due to their high robustness,compact size and down-scaling potential. However, aggressive scaling of the central N-region to improve area efficiency inevitably leads to critical punch-through leakage current and simply expanding the spacing will result in a reduction of area efficiency. To resolve this trade-off, a novel DDSCR utilizing a compensation doping technique is proposed and verified in a 180nm BCD process. The suppression mechanism is validated via TCAD simulations. TLP measurements demonstrate that the proposed DDSCR reduces leakage current by over five orders of magnitude (from over 1 mA to 10 nA) without any silicon area penalty, while preserving high robustness and bidirectional protection capability. This work provides an effective solution for suppressing punch-through leakage in ESD protection applications.