Active pull-down protection for full substrate current isolation in smart power IC's

Substrate current injection, and particularly minority carrier injection, is one of the major causes for redesign in smart power technology. This substrate parasitic current induces unexpected failure system such as latch-up in CMOS circuitry or analog signal perturbation. In this paper, we propose an efficient and compact protection, called active pull-down protection, against this substrate current. It reduces by more than 8 decades the injected current level.