A simple technique to induce and control short pulses of deep drain-source breakdown conditions

A simple method to induce drain-source breakdown, followed by the parasitic bipolar action, is reported for time intervals and energies sufficiently small to avoid thermal runaway. A relatively large capacitor, connected in parallel to the device under test, is charged up using a sufficiently large resistor and discharges automatically as the breakdown voltage (BV/sub DSS/) is reached, thus eliminating the need for a fast and ´ringing-free´ switch in the test setup. Since the discharge process is controlled by the small dynamic device resistance, rather than the large external resistor, the resulting transitions are fast enough and therefore compatible with electrostatic discharge (ESD) or latch-up turn-on conditions. Such pulses were successfully used to study soft ESD damage in lightly-doped-drain (LDD) devices, using simple on-wafer probing.<>