Single Chip of Electrostatic Discharge Detector for IC Manufacturing Field Control

• Published in: Proceedings of Technical Program of International Symposium on VLSI Design, Automation and Test pp. 1 - 4
• Main Authors: Wu, I-Hsuan, Ker, Ming-Dou
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 18.04.2022
• Subjects: Detectors; Electrostatic discharges; ESD; ESD detector; logarithmic amplifier; Power supplies; Production facilities; Silicon; Very large scale integration; Voltage measurement
• ISSN: 2472-9124
• DOI: 10.1109/VLSI-DAT54769.2022.9768083

To detect and alarm the electrostatic discharge (ESD) events during the IC manufacturing environments, an antenna-driven ESD-event detector has been designed and fabricated in a single chip. The practically measured results have shown that the high-frequency transient peak-to-peak voltage (Vpp) during the ESD event has a significant correlation with its ESD-stress voltage level. The proposed ESD-event detector includes a logarithmic amplifier, a comparator, and a time discriminator. The output of the logarithmic amplifier demodulating Vpp is compared to a reference voltage with the comparator. The time discriminator can identify the ESD pulse by its duration time afterward. The single chip of the ESD-event detector has been implemented in a 0.18-µm CMOS process with a total silicon area of only 693×563 µm 2 while dissipating 4.3 mW under a 1.8-V power supply. The proposed ESD-event detector can efficiently provide real-time ESD monitoring in the IC and semiconductor manufacturing factories.