ESD protection consideration in nanoscale CMOS technology

The thinner gate oxide in nanoscale CMOS technologies seriously degraded the electrostatic discharge (ESD) robustness of IC products. As the feature sizes in nanoscale CMOS technologies are further scaling down, the on-chip ESD protection designs are more challenging. The ESD protection considerations, including ESD design window, area efficiency, leakage current, and high-voltage tolerance, were presented in this abstract. Some possible solutions against these issues in nanoscale CMOS technologies were also included in this paper.