Investigation of ESD devices in 0.18 /spl mu/m SiGe BiCMOS process

This paper investigates the characteristics of ESD devices in a 0.18 /spl mu/m silicon-germanium (SiGe) BiCMOS process including SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs), gate-grounded N/PMOS transistors, p-n junction diodes in SiGe HBTs, p/sup +//n-well diodes, and BiCMOS deep-trench (DT) diodes. According to our results, an open base configuration in the SiGe HBT has a lower trigger voltage and higher ESD efficiency than the gate-grounded N/PMOS. In addition, we propose a novel BiCMOS low-leakage DT diode string with controllable blocking voltage for RF-ESD protection designs.