High Area Efficiency Bidirectional Silicon-Controlled Rectifier for Low-Voltage Electrostatic Discharge Protection

Continuously scaling down and decreasing operation voltages of ICs, from the 5 V TTL-compatible voltage to 3.3 V, then 1.2 now 0.8 for low-power results in more stringent electrostatic discharge protection design requirements, such as a narrow ESD window, low voltage, high robustness. Based on traditional diode string diode-triggered silicon-controlled rectifiers, an enhanced rectifier is proposed meet requirements low-voltage integrated circuits bidirectional protection. The new device employs additional PMOS NMOS N-well P-well, respectively, offer current paths along surface significantly enhance its TCAD simulation shows that triggered by both strings embedded MOS, making turn faster distribution uniform during ON state owing paths. has excellent dual-directional performance with figure merit 4.01 mA/um2, which about 71% improvement compared conventional rectifier. It also higher area efficiency, lower trigger leakage, turn-on speed. attractive solution ultra-low-voltage ICs.