B1. ESD protection of high speed / high frequency circuits

At a time when the downscaling of technology makes it increasingly difficult to meet the ESD specifications, new and evermore challenging applications make the job of the ESD engineer even more complex; many traditional solutions are rejected because they introduce too much capacitance, noise, etc. The goal of this workshop is to increase the awareness and insight of the ESD designers by discussing the most important figures of merit for both the ESD devices as well as the full ESD strategy, focusing on the protection of high speed interfaces. Both design and layout aspects will be discussed, comparing different protection techniques. We will compare all these trade-offs to figure out what are the remaining options in the shrinking tool box of the ESD engineer.