SRF Tech
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Posts: 59
Arizona
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The trade-off between parasitic capacitance versus ESD performance, and then adding in the arguements of diodes versus SCR/snapback based devices is old and very inconclusive.
It is inconclusive because performance of diodes/SCR's/snapback devices are very much process and design dependent, as is the parasitic capacitance. Some processes have very good snapback performance for their standrad ggNMOS's, others do not. Some have very good diode conductance in the high current region, other do not. Also capacitance is as much dependent on metalization as it is on device type/device design. There are no clear answers.
I personally subscribe to the idea that diodes can generally deliver the best ESD performance per unit capacitance. There was also a paper which had a similar conclusions: "C., Richier, et al., “Investigations of different ESD protection strategies devoted to 3.3V RF applications (2Ghz) in a 0.18um CMOS process,” Proc. EOS/ESD Symp., pp251-259, 2000."
I actually developed a diode for one of my clients that achieved ~60-70mA/fF of performance, under high current conditions. (it was a ~50fF diode that could sink ~3.5A @ ~5V) (Note this was a very aggressive diode construction that was uncoventional, you won't find it in your standard 3rd party ESD library, but is evidence of the superiority of diodes--IMHO). I, personally, have yet to achieve similar performance using an SCR type design (someone else might know of one). Note I would never even consider ggNMOS or gcNMOS devices for high speed applications, the drain-gate capacitance is a horrible parasitic that offers you nothing.
If you find that your diodes are excesively loading down your circuits, I would first look at your diode layouts and find ways to optimize it. You may also need to look at your product's/SoC's ESD and IO architecture, to find ways of minimizing ESD burden on your sensitive pins. There are many techniques to accomplish this.
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