Novel electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection solution in GaAs pHEMT technology

This paper develops an effective electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection solution for GaAs-based integrated circuits based on a novel multi-gate pHEMT. With approximately the same layout area, the proposed ESD protection clamp can carry an ESD current three times higher than the conventional single-gate pHEMT clamp under the human body model (HBM) stress. Moreover, the new ESD clamp shows promising results when characterized under the charged device model (CDM) stress. The parasitic capacitance of the new ESD clamp is also measured to assess its suitability for high-frequency ESD applications.