Evaluation of ESD characteristics for 65 nm SOI technology

With aggressive scaling and continuous drive for higher performance requirements, electrostatic discharge is becoming a major reliability challenge for advanced integrated circuits. Products must be designed with proper ESD protection circuits to provide adequate robustness and as the limits of the device capability are reached, factors like device reliability due to ESD sensitivity became more critical. In this paper, the ESD characteristics of I/O elements in 65nm SOI technology are thoroughly evaluated. With an appropriate design implementation using these discrete elements, industry standard ESD robustness can be achieved.