ESD-induced circuit performance degradation in RFICs

ESD structures have inevitable parasitic impacts on circuit performance. This paper reports results of an investigation into ESD-induced circuit performance degradation in RFICs including clock corruption, reduced slew rate, narrowed bandwidth, and noise generation. Performance degradation of similar to 80%, similar to 30% & similar to5% were observed in clock, Op Amp and LNA circuits studied, which were recovered substantially by using novel compact ESD structures that are critical to reducing ESD-to-circuit influences while maintaining adequate ESD performance. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.