A Novel Method for Automatically Extracting Breakdown Voltage of Zener Diodes from I-V Characteristics Curves

Zener diode is widely used in IC design, and its breakdown voltage is an important electrical parameter. However, since the Zener diode has been designed and optimized through the use of a design of experiment (DOE) approach based on TCAD simulations, a large amount of I-V characteristics curves are generated, and then processed by manual method for extracting the breakdown voltages, which is time consuming and error prone. In this paper, a novel numerical method is proposed, mainly including data filling, data smoothing, and anomaly detection. It is successfully applied to automatically extract the breakdown voltages with low human intervention and excellent repeatability.