The effects of substrate coupling on triggering uniformity and ESD failure threshold of fully silicided NMOS transistors

We present a multi-finger turn-on model incorporating substrate coupling effects in multi-finger NMOS transistors during ESD events. It is demonstrated that the substrate coupling enables uniform triggering in a multi-finger structure. In addition, we show that fully silicided transistors can be used successfully as an ESD protection device without any design/process options if the effective epi thickness is larger than 1.5 /spl mu/m or bulk wafer is used.