A Silicon Controlled Rectifier-Based ESD Protection Circuit with High Holding Voltage and High Robustness Characteristics

In this paper, a Silicon Controlled Rectifier (SCR)-based Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) protection circuit with high holding voltage and high robustness characteristics is proposed. Unlike conventional SCR, the proposed circuit has low trigger voltage and high holding voltage and provides effective ESD protection with latch-up immunity. In addition, the TCAD simulation results show that the proposed circuit has better electrical characteristics than the conventional SCR. A stack technology was used for voltage-specific applications. Consequentially, the proposed circuit has a trigger voltage of 17.60 V and a holding voltage of 3.64 V.

Design of Novel SCR-based ESD Protection Device for I/O Clamp in BCD Process

In this paper, a novel LVTSCR-based device for electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection of integrated circuits (ICs) is designed, fabricated and characterized. The proposed device is similar to the conventional LVTSCR but it has an embedded PMOSFET in the anode n-well to enhance the turn on speed, the clamping capability and the robustness. This is possible because the embedded PMOSFET provides the sub-path of ESD discharge current. The TLP, HBM and MM testing are carried out to verify the ESD performance of the proposed devices, which are fabricated in 0.35um (Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS) BCDMOS process. The device has the robustness of 70mA/um that is higher about 60mA/um than the LVTSCR, approximately.