Failure analysis of operational amplifier due to ESD stress in complementary bipolar process

This paper presents a research on ESD problems for a complementary bipolar (CB) process based high-speed operational amplifier (OP). The failure location and failure mode of the OP under ESD stress was verified using KeyTek ZapMaster Mk.2. Based on the analysis, failure mechanism was found, according to which modifications were made on the new batch. The modified high speed OP achieves > 4KV ESD protection capability.