Modeling and Simulation of Comprehensive Diode Behavior Under Electrostatic Discharge Stresses

Diodes are effective devices for electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection. To accurately predict ESD robustness through circuit simulation of protection architectures in integrated circuits that use diodes, an enhanced model is proposed. This model is constructed with several compact model elements to simulate all physical device behaviors under high current transient ESD conditions, namely, voltage overshoot, on-resistance variation, and thermal failure. The proposed model implements a thermal monitor, which cannot only correlate current-voltage characteristics with the self-heating effect, but accurately predicts thermal failure under different pulse width conditions. The simulation results of this comprehensive diode model benchmarked against measurements are also reported.