Design of High-Voltage-Tolerant Power-Rail ESD Protection Circuit for Power Pin of Negative Voltage in Low-Voltage CMOS Processes

In the implanted biomedical devices, the silicon chips with monopolar stimulation design have been widely applied. To protect the negative-voltage pins of the implanted silicon chip from the electrostatic discharge (ESD) damage, the ESD protection circuit should be carefully designed to avoid any wrong current path under normal circuit operation with the negative voltage. In this article, a new power-rail ESD clamp circuit for the application with an operating voltage of -6 V has been proposed and verified in a 0.18-μm 3.3-V CMOS process. The proposed-circuit, realized with only 3.3-V nMOS/pMOS devices, is able to prevent the gate-oxide reliability issue under this -6-V application. With the proposed ESD detection circuit, the turn-on speed of the main ESD clamp device, which is a stacked-nMOS (STnMOS), can be greatly enhanced. The STnMOS with a width of 400 μm can sustain over 8-kV human body model (HBM) ESD stress and perform low standby leakage current of ~5.4 nA at room temperature under the circuit operating condition with -6-V supply voltage.