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AssigneeHong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute Company Limited
InventorsXaiowu CAI, Beiping YAN, Xiaoyang DU, Xiao HUO, Xiaoyong HAN, Bingyong YAN
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A power-to-ground clamp transistor provides electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection. A filter capacitor and resistor generate a filter voltage that is buffered by three stages to drive the gate of the clamp transistor. The filter capacitor is about twenty times smaller than in a conventional clamp circuit. Feedback in the circuit keeps the clamp transistor turned on after the R-C time constant of the capacitor and resistor in the filer has elapsed, allowing for a smaller capacitor to turn on the clamp transistor longer. A sub-threshold-conducting transistor in the first stage conducts only a small sub-threshold current, which extends the discharge time of the first stage. The gate of the sub-threshold-conducting transistor is driven by feedback from the second stage. A feed-forward resistor has a high resistance value to slowly raise the voltage of the second stage from the filter voltage, and thus slowly raise the gate of the sub-threshold-conducting transistor.
A protection circuit comprising:
A Vdd-to-Vss electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection circuit comprising:
A core protection device for protecting core transistors from electrostatic discharge (ESD) pulses comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.