An investigation on capacitance-trigger ESD protection devices for high voltage integrated circuits

• A novel cascaded complementary dual-directional SCR structure has been proposed.
• ESD characteristics of the capacitance-trigger CCDSCR have been investigated.
• The proposed CCDSCR has the best ESD protection performance for HV ICs.

A novel cascaded complementary dual-directional silicon controlled rectifier (CCDSCR) structure has been proposed and implemented in a 0.5 μm 20 V Bipolar/CMOS/DMOS process as an ESD (electrostatic discharge) protection device. The ESD characteristics of the capacitance-trigger CCDSCR has been investigated by transmission line pulse (TLP) testing. Compared with the substrate-trigger insulated gate bipolar transistor with the enhanced substrate parasitic capacitance, the gate-driven trigger insulated gate bipolar transistor with the gate coupling capacitance and the normal dual-directional silicon controlled rectifier, the CCDSCR has the highest holding voltage of about 25.4 V and the best current conduction uniformity. In addition, it has the best figure of merit (FOM) with the value of about 0.64 mA/μm2. The good current conduction uniformity in CCDSCR due to the enhanced substrate parasitic capacitance-trigger effect is finally confirmed by Sentaurus simulations.