The influence of the layout on the ESD performance of HV-LDMOS

The root causes of the high voltage (HV) LDMOS (Fig. 2) failed at the low voltage electrostatic-discharge (ESD) zap is found. One is caused by the bulk layout and one is caused by the intrinsic characteristic of the device. From the findings, a new structure is proposed to eliminate the root causes without sacrificing the IV characteristics and dimension of the device.