Design and process considerations for 1200V HVIC technology

A 1200V LDMOS structure based on 600V LDMOS technology has been developed for level shifters of industrial high side gate driver IC and SPM® solution. For a 1200V LDMOS, the two serious phenomena occurred such as walk-out of a few hundreds volts and burn-out at a few µA of drain current during breakdown measurement unlike 600V LDMOS having rugged breakdown characteristics. In this work, these challenges were clearly solved by critical techniques and LDMOS showed stable breakdown voltage of about 1400V without walk-out and burn-out phenomena. Here, the causes and prevention technics on these challenges are described in detail in this paper.