A Novel Method for Guard Ring Efficiency Assessment and its Applications for ESD Protection Design and Optimization

The new measurement methodology allows extracting guard ring efficiency under ESD stress conditions. A new figure of merit to design latch-up protection around ESD protection structures is defined and showed that an optimal sizing of critical dimension can be achieved to enhanced ESD protection levels. The efficiency of the approach opens a new area to study latch-up guard ring design with respect to ESD stress conditions. The methodology could be used to address the impact of technology parameters like STI depth, doping profiles and is generic enough to be applied to any kind of ESD protection strategies and devices