Design of radiation-hardened ESD protection for RS485 drivers

ESD protection plays an important role in integrated circuits. ICs used in space require radiation-hardened capability, which is sometimes in conflict with ESD protection performance. In this paper, An RS485 driver with both excellent ESD and radiation-hard protections is proposed. The proposed driver was implemented with an 0.6μm SOI CMOS process with circuit design and protection strategy optimizations. HBM ESD level of 3kV, total dose radiation level of 100K rad(Si), and single event effect level of 75 MeV.cm
²
/mg were achieved to satisfy the applications.