Protection design against system-level ESD transient disturbance on display panels

A hardware/firmware system co-design has been proposed in this work to protect display electronic products against system-level electrostatic discharge (ESD) transient disturbance. By including transient detection circuit, the firmware can execute system recovery procedure to recover all electrical functions under system-level ESD tests. The transient detection circuit is designed to detect different positive and negative fast electrical transients and verified in a 0.13-µm CMOS process. The experimental results have confirmed that the proposed hardware/firmware design can successfully improve the susceptibility of display products against system-level ESD zapping.