Design of an On-Board ESD Protection for USB3 Applications

This paper describes the development of an on-board system level protection for high-speed cable connections (e.g., USB3) with 15 kV robustness and a signal transfer rate of up to 10 Gb/s. A dedicated bipolar process is developed, on a high-resistive substrate with optimized diffusion profiles and a special via-on-via metallization to meet the capacitance target of 0.25 pF. The protection is shown to work well with several popular USB3 chipsets.