Investigation on seal-ring rules for IC product reliability in 0.25-μm CMOS technology

The distance between active region and the seal-ring location has been investigated in a 0.25-μm CMOS process. From the experimental results, this distance can be shrunk to only 5 μm without increasing leakage current and decreasing ESD robustness of the ESD protection devices after reliability tests of High-Accelerated Stress Test (HAST) and Temperature Cycling Test (TCT).