Ultra-Low-Voltage-Triggered Silicon Controlled Rectifier ESD Protection Device for 2.5 V Nano Integrated Circuit

Ruibo Chen; Hao Wei; Hongxia Liu; Zhiwei Liu; Yaolin Chen

doi:10.3390/nano12234250

Ultra-Low-Voltage-Triggered Silicon Controlled Rectifier ESD Protection Device for 2.5 V Nano Integrated Circuit

Nanomaterials (Basel). 2022 Nov 29;12(23):4250. doi: 10.3390/nano12234250.

Authors

Ruibo Chen¹, Hao Wei¹, Hongxia Liu¹, Zhiwei Liu², Yaolin Chen¹

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory for Wide Band Gap Semiconductor Materials and Devices of Education, School of Microelectronics, Xidian University, Xi'an 710071, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin Films and Integrated Devices, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610056, China.

Abstract

In this paper, an improved low-voltage-triggered silicon-controlled rectifier (LVTSCR) called an ultra-low-voltage-triggered SCR (ULVTSCR) is proposed and fabricated in a 40-nm CMOS process. By adding an external NMOSs-chain triggering component to the conventional LVTSCR, the proposed ULVTSCR can realize ~2 V lower trigger voltage. Meanwhile, the trigger voltage of the ULVTSCR is adjustable with the number of its incorporated NMOS transistors. Compared with the existing Diodes-chain Triggered SCR (DTSCR) scheme, the NMOSs-chain triggered ULVTSCR possesses a 25% lowered overshoot voltage in the same area consumption, and thus it is more suitable for 2.5 V circuits ESD protections considering the CDM protection applications.

Keywords: SCR; on-chip ESD; overshoot; trigger voltage.

Abstract

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