ESD protection design for Giga-Hz high-speed I/O interfaces in a 130-nm CMOS process

The electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection design for high-speed input/output (I/O) interfaces in a 130-nm CMOS process is proposed in this paper. First, the ESD protection devices were designed and fabricated to evaluate their ESD robustness and the parasitic effects in giga-hertz frequency band. With the knowledge on the dependence of device dimensions on ESD robustness and the parasitic capacitance, the ESD protection circuit for high-speed I/O interfaces was designed with minimum degradation on high-speed circuit performance but satisfactory high ESD robustness.