Technology of Integrated Circuits

Integrated circuits (IC's) have undergone a significant evolution in terms of complexity and performance as a result 'of the substantial advances made in manufacturing technology. Circuits, in their various mixed formats, can be made up tens or even hundreds of millions of devices. They work at extremely low voltages and switch at very high frequencies. Testing of circuits has become an essential process in IC manufacturing, in the effort to ensure that the manufactured components have the appropriate levels of quality. Along with the ongoing trend towards more advanced technology and circuit features, major testing challenges are continuously emerging. The use of ambivalent procedures to test the analogue and digital sections of such complex circuits without interfering in their nominal operation is clearly a critical part of today's technological ipdustries.

Very fast advances in IC technologies have brought new challenges into the physical design of integrated systems. The emphasis on system performance, in lately developed applications, requires timing and power constraints to be considered at each stage of physical design. The size of ICs is decreasing continuously, and the density of power dissipated in the circuits is growing rapidly. The first challenge is the Information Technology where new materials, devices, telecommunication and multimedia facilities are developed.

This book enables readers to design effective ESD protection solutions for all mainstream RF fabrication processes (GaAs pHEMT, SiGe HBT, CMOS). The new techniques introduced by the authors have much higher protection levels and much lower parasitic effects than those of existing ESD protection devices.

The purpose of this book is to present analysis and design principles, procedures and techniques of analog integrated circuits which are to be implemented in MOS (metal oxide semiconductor) technology. MOS technology is becoming dominant in the realization of digital systems, and its use for analog circuits opens new pos­ sibilities for the design of complex mixed analog/digital VLSI (very large scale in­ tegration) chips. Although we are focusing attention in this book principally on circuits and systems which can be implemented in CMOS technology, many con­ siderations and structures are of a general nature and can be adapted to other promising and emerging technologies, namely GaAs (Gallium Arsenide) and BI­ MOS (bipolar MOS, i. e. circuits which combine both bipolar and CMOS devices) technology. Moreover, some of the structures and circuits described in this book can also be useful without integration. In this book we describe two large classes of analog integrated circuits: • switched capacitor (SC) networks, • continuous-time CMOS (unswitched) circuits. SC networks are sampled-data systems in which electric charges are transferred from one point to another at regular discrete intervals of time and thus the signal samples are stored and processed. Other circuits belonging to this class of sampled-data systems are charge transfer devices (CTD) and charge coupled dev­ ices (CCD). In contrast to SC circuits, continuous-time CMOS circuits operate continuously in time. They can be considered as subcircuits or building blocks (e. g.