ESD: a pervasive reliability concern for IC technologies

Several aspects of ESD are described from the point of view of the test, design, product, and reliability engineering. A review of the ESD phenomena along with the test methods, the appropriate on-chip protection techniques, and the impact of process technology advances from CMOS to BiCMOS on the ESD sensitivity of IC protection circuits are presented. The status of understanding in the field of ESD failure physics and the current approaches for modeling are discussed     

Self-heating effects in basic semiconductor structures

Investigates the effects of self-heating on the high current I -V characteristics of semiconductor structures using a fully coupled electrothermal device simulator. It is shown that the breakdown in both resistors and diodes is caused by conductivity modulation due to minority carrier generation. In isothermal simulations with T=300 K, avalanche generation is the source of minority carriers. In simulations with self-heating, both avalanche and thermal generation of minority carriers can contribute to the breakdown mechanism. The voltage and current at breakdown are dependent on the structure of the device and the doping concentration in the region with lower doping. For all structures, except highly doped resistors with poor heating sinking at the contacts, the temperature at thermal breakdown ranged from 1.25T_i to 3T_i , where T_i is the temperature at which the semiconductor goes intrinsic. Hence, it is found that T=T_i is not a general condition for thermal (or second) breakdown. From these studies, an improved condition for thermal breakdown is proposed     

ESD issues for advanced CMOS technologies

As technologies advance towards the deep submicron, the ESD protection design issues have been known to become more critical. This paper examines the recent trends in ESD protection designs, the technology impact, and the specific approaches to build-in ESD reliability. It is shown that the efficient performance of advanced protection designs requires an optimized process that can meet the ESD robustness criterion.     

High-current failure model for VLSI interconnects under short-pulsestress conditions

Short-time high joule heating causing thermal breakdown of metal interconnects in ESD/EOS protection circuits and I/O buffers has become a reliability concern. Such failures occur frequently during testing for latchup robustness and during ESD/EOS type events. In this work, heating and failure of passivated TiN/AlCu/TiN integrated circuit interconnects in a quadruple level metallization system of a sub-0.5 μm CMOS technology has been characterized under high-current pulse conditions. A model incorporating the heating of the layered metal system and the oxide surrounding it has been developed which relates the maximum allowable current density to the pulse width. The model is shown to be in excellent agreement with experimental results and is applied to generate design guidelines for ESD/EOS and I/O buffer interconnects     

Technology design for high current and ESD robustness in a deepsubmicron CMOS process

The intrinsic ESD/EOS robustness of a technology is determined by the sensitivity to thermal initiated second breakdown. We show, for the first time, high current and ESD robustness results for a deep submicron CMOS technology with drawn poly gate lengths of 0.35 μm and oxide thicknesses down to 4.5 nm. It is shown that a transistor design window can be determined for optimized drive current and good robustness, while maintaining low off currents. An important observation is that robustness increases for smaller channel lengths and is directly proportional to the transistor drive current. Hence, robust deep submicron technologies can be designed with optimized transistor performance without using additional masks or increasing process complexity     

Design methodology and optimization of gate-driven NMOS ESDprotection circuits in submicron CMOS processes

This paper describes the design methodology for gate driven NMOS ESD protection in submicron CMOS processes. A new PNP Driven NMOS (PDNMOS)-protection scheme is presented. Without requiring any additional process steps or introducing any additional impedance in signal path, the PDN-MOS is effective even for small analog/mixed-signal designs. SPICE simulations are used to optimize the design. High ESD performance of the PDNMOS protection in both nonsilicided and silicided submicron processes is demonstrated in this work