Keywords:
ESD
NPN
Transmission Line Pulse
TCAD (Technology Computer-Aided Design)
Wunsh-Bell model
CDM (Charge Device Model)
HBM (Human Body Model)
The reasearch is focused on the development of software tools for the simulation of the electrothermal behavior of ESD protection cells for high-voltage (>20V) applications will be addressed with different approaches. Integrated NPN structures do feature snapback and they represent a very desirable trade-off between area and performance. HV NPNs have been observed to suffer from lack of scalability (i.e., performance getting progressively worse as stress time duration increases). New phenomena are expected also in correlation with very fast stresses, where the performance of HV NPN needs to be investigated and checked with respect to the expected power scaling dictated by Wunsch-Bell law (i.e., CDM performance versus HBM performance). This problem will be addressed with numerical simulations in 2D and eventually 3D domains in order to understand the root-cause of the HV NPNs failure conditions under different stress conditions in order to devise the best TCAD methodology and fully understand the behavior of such devices.
