A new high-voltage interconnection shielding method for SOI monolithic ICs

The high-voltage interconnection (HVI) issue becomes severe in the high-voltage monolithic ICs when single-layer metal is used for lowering the cost. This paper proposes a dual deep-oxide trenches (DDOT) structure for 500 V Silicon-on-Insulator Lateral Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (SOI-LIGBT) to shield the influence of HVI on the breakdown voltage. Compared with the conventional DDOT structure, HVI region of the proposed DDOT structure is shrunk by employing a shallow trench (T1) and a deep trench (T2). Besides the breakdown mechanism in the off-state, the current density and impact ionization rate distributions in the on-state of the proposed structure are also investigated. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed DDOT structure can fully shield the influence of HVI with significant reduction in the area of silicon region beneath the HVI. With almost the same off-state breakdown voltage (BVoff) of 550 V as the conventional DDOT structure, the length of the silicon region under the HVI in the proposed structure is shortened from 45 μm to 15 μm. Meanwhile, no on-state breakdown voltage (BVon) degradation is observed according to the measured results. The new method proposed in this work can also be used for other types of high-voltage devices such as LDMOS and free-wheeling diode in SOI Monolithic ICs.