ESD-Event Detector for ESD Control Applications in Semiconductor Manufacturing Factories

Abstract

An electrostatic discharge (ESD)-event detector has been designed and fabricated in a single chip to detect and alarm the ESD events in semiconductor or integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing environments. The experiment measured results showed that the peak-to-peak voltage of the detected signal during an ESD event has a strong correlation with its ESD-stress voltage level. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">The proposed ESD-event detector can determine a</b> detected <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">signal to be an ESD pulse if its signal amplitude is higher than the settable threshold and its duration time is under 500 ns.</b> The ESD-event detector circuit, including a <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">450 MHz</b> logarithmic amplifier, a comparator, and a time discriminator, has been implemented in a single chip with a total silicon area of only 693 × 563 <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">μ</i> <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathbf{m}}^2$</tex-math></inline-formula> and fabricated by 0.18- <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">μ</i> m CMOS process. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">The detector can detect high-frequency transient signals up to 450 MHz, which has been successfully verified in the field tests by detecting the signals generated from the ESD generators, the human-body model tester, and the field-induced charged-device model tester.</b> The proposed ESD-event detector can efficiently perform the real-time ESD monitoring applications in the IC and semiconductor manufacturing factories.