Single Chip of Electrostatic Discharge Detector for IC Manufacturing Field Control

To detect and alarm the electrostatic discharge (ESD) events during the IC manufacturing environments, an antenna-driven ESD-event detector has been designed and fabricated in a single chip. The practically measured results have shown that the high-frequency transient peak-to-peak voltage (Vpp) during the ESD event has a significant correlation with its ESD-stress voltage level. The proposed ESD-event detector includes a logarithmic amplifier, a comparator, and a time discriminator. The output of the logarithmic amplifier demodulating Vpp is compared to a reference voltage with the comparator. The time discriminator can identify the ESD pulse by its duration time afterward. The single chip of the ESD-event detector has been implemented in a 0.18-µm CMOS process with a total silicon area of only 693×563 µm² while dissipating 4.3 mW under a 1.8-V power supply. The proposed ESD-event detector can efficiently provide real-time ESD monitoring in the IC and semiconductor manufacturing factories.