Employing Ceramic Products to Design an Electrostatic Discharge Protection for High-Speed Signal Lines

Abstract

With the advance of microelectronics technologies and integrated circuits (ICs) processes, the electrostatic discharge (ESD) has become one of the most important reliability issues in IC products. But treating the ESD-related problems is a real challenge. The paper focuses on the influence of the using of Universal Serial Bus (USB) in plugging and/or unplugging impact arisen from ESD and also proposes an ESD protection design to improve the ESD robustness. This work utilizes off-chip protection along with the commercial ceramic products to achieve effective ESD protection. The impact of the ESD stress applied at the connector pins of USB is evaluated. The protection design for the high-speed signal lines is easily to implement and achieves the following attractive features: (1) Power trace protection, (2) Signals traces protection, (3) GND protection, and (4) Shield protection. Numerous tests have been made to demonstrate the effectiveness of the work.