ESD Layout Designs

One of the common electrostatic discharge (ESD) design failure problems is due to inappropriate ESD layout designs, which often causes unexpected problems under ESD stressing at chip level such as parasitic ESD discharge structures or local current crowding. This chapter discusses the importance of physical layout design in ESD protection designs, which should never be overlooked in real‐world IC designs. It presents general ESD layout considerations for commonly used basic ESD protection structures, including diode, BJT, MOSFET, and SCR device structures. Since layout design features are directly associated with local ESD current crowding and overheating, particularly at the corners and edges of an ESD protection structure, true 3D TCAD ESD simulation can be very useful in guiding ESD layout designs with subtle details. True 3D TCAD ESD simulation is used to analyze the corner/edge effect, i.e., local ESD current crowding and overheating in a real‐world DTSCR ESD protection structure.