Microelectronic Circuit Design

This book guides readers through the entire complex of interrelated theoretical and practical aspects of the end-to-end design and organization of production of silicon submicron integrated circuits. The discussion includes the theoretical foundations of the operation of field-effect- and bipolar transistors, the methods and peculiarities of the structural and schematic design, basic circuit-design and system-design engineering solutions for bipolar, CMOS, BiCMOS and TTL integrated circuits, standard design libraries, and typical design flows.

This book is part of the Analog Circuit Design series and contains the revised contributions of all speakers of the 16th AACD Workshop, which was organized by Jan Sevenhans of AMI Semiconductor and held in Oostende, Belgium on March 27-29, 2007. The book comprises 17 tutorial papers, divided in three chapters, each discussing a very relevant topic in present days analog design.

The challenges associated with the design and implementation of Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) protection circuits are becoming increasingly complex as technology is scaled well into nano-metric regime. Traditional approaches of ESD design may not be adequate as the ESD damages occur at successively lower voltages in nano-metric dimensions. There are several challenges that must be met in order to design robust ESD circuits today. Due to technology scaling and proliferation of automated handling, ESD failures in ICs caused by Charged Device Model (CDM) are increasing. CDM discharges can cause latent damages which could degrade and eventually lead to definite failures in the ICs. The ESD protection design for current and future sub-65nm CMOS circuits is a challenge for high I/O count, multiple power domains and flip-chip products.