Improvement of Electrostatic Discharge Protection by Introducing a Spindt-Type Silicon Field Emission Device

Abstract

In this paper, an original Spindt-type silicon field emission device (FED) with electrostatic discharge (ESD) regulation capability is proposed. The fabricated FED characteristics, including process parameters, capacitance–voltage (C–V), current–voltage (I–V), and frequency response, are investigated. To verify its capability of ESD protection, we replace the metal oxide varistor (MOV) in a state-of-the-art protection configuration with the fabricated FED under the application conditions of system-level ESD tests. The measured results show that the proposed ESD protection circuit composed of a prestage gas arrestor, an intermediate resistor, and an introduced FED can suppress an injected ESD pulse voltage of 6000 to 3193 V, a reduction of 46.8%, whereas suppression is to 5606 V, a reduction of 6.57%, when using only a gas arrestor.