Techniques to prevent substrate injection induced failure during ESD events in automotive applications

This paper presents several techniques to improve ESD robustness for high voltage IO designs in automotive applications. SCR-based ESD clamps designed on isolated wells can generate high level of substrate injection during ESD events, causing false triggering and irreversible failures of internal components. To mitigate substrate injection effects, we have defined design strategies leading to a set of designs rules for proper integration with ESD clamps.