ESD Protection Made Simple

Written by Gene L Forte January 15, 2010 Hits: 1811 Favorites

3.0 (1)

Checking for complete ESD protection is a challenge during physical verification of virually all types of ICs, especially ones requiring high reliability in dangerous environments (like your car). After all, how do you check something that's been left out?

There have been some specialized checkers out there for a while, but they tend to fall down in specific areas: 1) they can't incorporate customer-specific rules and criteria very easily, and 2) they don't deal with multi-voltage-domain (low power) chips very well.

If your're interesting in learning more about the problem and possible solutions, you can download a paper from Mentor Graphics at: http://www.mentor.com/products/ic_nanometer_design/techpubs/addressing-reliability-and-circuit-verification-challenges-with-calibre-perc-42217

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Overall:

3.0

ESD protection: checking is only one aspect

Overall:

3.0

Reviewed by Bart Keppens
January 19, 2010

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Hi Gene

I agree that some sort of automatic checking tool can drastically reduce the risk of failures related to ESD and the Mentor PERC tool features seems right on for this job. I see a lot of potential in this new tool development.

However, I fear that it might be too costly for (small) fabless outfits to get the tool and additionally spend time to write the rules themselves. Is there any news on Mentor working together with major foundries to port (at least) the foundry ESD rules into PERC's rule format?

Finally, while checking if the right ESD devices are connected is one thing. Ensuring that the selected ESD device is the right one is another. At Sofics (www.sofics.com) we are focused on product proven ESD protection IP and related services and provide ESD protection clamps that are complementary to the foundry approaches: Clamps with extremely low leakage, low capacitance, small area or scaled for high ESD protection or any other custom requirement.

Owner's reply

We agree that developing the infrastructure to do ESD or any kind of electrical rule checking is not trivial (the blog headline was a bit facetious). So we are working with major foundries to encapsulate their requirements and make them available to customers. The first of these should be available around the middle of the year.

In the meantime, Mentor has created a Calibre PERC catalog that includes descriptions of common checks that are in the public domain and sourced from various industry standard groups. These are precoded for customers to use as-is or modify as they see fit. The catalog is included with Calibre PERC software.

Written by :

Gene L Forte