Gate Grounded Trench I-MOS as an ESD Clamp for Sub-2V Applications

In this paper, using calibrated 2-D simulations we have reported a new gate grounded trench impact ionization MOS (GGTIMOS) electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection device for sub-2V operating voltage applications. The proposed GGTIMOS ESD device exhibits ~3x, and ~1.75x reduction in the trigger voltage in comparison to the traditional GGIMOS, and GGNMOS, respectively. The proposed GGTIMOS ESD device also exhibits a hold voltage of ~2.2 V, which is ~2x higher than the recently published
$\pi $
-SCR ESD device, hence, the proposed GGTIMOS is a suitable ESD device for the sub-2V operating voltage applications. Moreover, for the 2 kV human body model (HBM) the proposed GGTIMOS ESD device requires ~28% less device width than its counterpart GGIMOS ESD device, which makes it more area efficient. In addition, through 2 kV HBM simulation, we have shown that the GGTIMOS ESD device eliminates ESD stress
$\sim 1~\mu \text{s}$
and the maximum temperature reached during the event is approximately 750 K which is well within the failure limits. Therefore, the results demonstrated in this paper can pave the way for future ESD design for the technology nodes where the maximum voltage handling capacity of the input/output (I/O) driver is in the range of 1.2 V to 1.8 V.