Investigation of signal integrity issues in multi-path electrostatic discharge protection device

This paper studies signal integrity issues in a multi-path electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection device. A commercial four-path ESD protection device is investigated as a case study. The insertion loss, mode conversion and crosstalk of the test circuit are measured. Besides, a circuit model is proposed which has the ability to explain the behavior of the ESD protection device in insertion loss, mode conversion and crosstalk up to 10 GHz. The model is SPICE-compatible and can be used in SPICE-like simulator. Comparison between simulation by ADS and measurement results are also shown. By investigating the model, mechanisms for those non-ideal effects are discussed in this paper as well.