On a Parasitic Bipolar Transistor Action in a Diode ESD Protection Device
- 1 Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering, Hongik University, Sejong, Korea
Abstract
In this work, we show that an excessive lattice heating problem can occur in the diode electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection device connected to a V DD bus in the popular diode input protection scheme, which is favorably used in CMOS RF ICs. To figure out the reason for the excessive lattice heating, we construct an equivalent circuit for input human-body model (HBM) test environment of a CMOS chip equipped with the diode protection circuit, and execute mixed-mode transient simulations utilizing a 2-D device simulator. We analyze the simulation results in detail to show out that a parasitic pnp bipolar transistor action relating nearby p + -substrate contacts is responsible for the excessive lattice heating in the diode protection device, which has never been focused before anywhere.
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