ESD-induced circuit performance degradation in RFICs

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