摘要

A novel high performance 3xVDD-tolerant electrostatic discharging (ESD) detection circuit using only 1xVDD devices was presented in a 28 nm 1.8 V high-k metal-gate (HKMG) CMOS technology. A sub-path and an enhanced path were adopted in this novel design to increase its trigger current. Two small-sized PMOS transistors were employed to protect this circuit out of gate-oxide reliability issues under normal operating conditions. And there is only one capacitor in our novel circuit to maintain a small layout area. Under the ESD stress events, spectre-simulation results show that the trigger current of our proposed circuit can reach 36.4 mA. And its leakage current is only 2.8 nA at 27 degrees C, 243 nA at 120 degrees C under normal operating conditions.

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