Internal-Distributed CDM ESD Protection

CDM ESD protection is a major ESD protection design challenge for advanced ICs, often suffering from random design failures. It was recently reported that the traditional pad-based CDM ESD protection method is fundamentally faulty, contributing to design uncertainties in CDM ESD testing and field failures. This paper reports a novel internally distributed CDM ESD protection method to overcome this major design challenge, which was validated using an internal-CDM-protected oscillator IC implemented in a foundry 45nm SPO CMOS technology.