Electrostatic Discharge Protection for a 10 GHz Low Noise Amplifier

Electrostatic discharge (ESD) is one of the most important failure mechanisms of integrated circuits (ICs).ESD can damage ICs during manufacture, assembly of the component on the printed circuit boards and use in the field as part of a system.Therefore, an adequate ESD protection is required to improve yield and to reduce field return due to ESD damage, consequently, it is necessary that all ICs are protected against ESD.However, ESD protection can adversely cause degradation of IC performance, particularly on radio frequency (RF) ICs.These types of ICs are the most affected by the introduction of ESD protection, which cause the degradation of RF parameters.As a result, reduction of the RF performance degradation is highly desired and was the focus of this study.Two LNAs, one with ESD protection and another without ESD protection were designed and implemented in 0.13 µm RFCMOS technology.The operation frequency of the LNA was 10 GHz.The ESD protection used encompasses PI topology ESD protection, comprising the primary ESD protection diodes, LNA gate inductor, secondary ESD protection diodes, and power clamps.The desired level of ESD protection for the LNA was 2000 V for the Human Body Model (HBM).The study was limited to the verification of the degradation of the S-parameters, noise figure, and ESD protection level at the LNA input.Comparing the simulated results of the LNA without ESD protection with the LNA with ESD protection, the only significant RF parameter degradation was observed iii in the noise figure (NF).The LNA without ESD protection exhibited NF=2.4 dB, while the LNA with ESD protection exhibited NF=3.4 dB.The LNA with ESD protection passed a 2000V ESD stress without showing leakage and degradation of the S-parameters and noise.The main contribution of this work is to show that the degradation of RF parameters can be minimized by choosing the appropriate ESD protection and by taking it into account in early stages of the design process.

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