Design of Fin-Diode-Triggered Rotated Silicon-Controlled Rectifier for High-Speed Digital Application in 16-nm FinFET Process

The FinFET architecture has widely been used in the digital circuit application, due to the good short channel effect control and driving current boost. However, the worse thermal dispassion and smaller effective silicon volume would cause the significant impacts during the circuits under electrostatic discharge (ESD) event. Thus, the ESD protection device should be installed into the high-speed digital circuit to enhance the ESD robustness. To avoid the effect of circuit performance, the parasitic capacitance of ESD device must be as low as possible. In this article, two types of Fin-diode-triggered rotated silicon-controlled rectifier (SCR) with dual ESD current path have been proposed and verified in a 16-nm FinFET CMOS process. The proposed devices have better current-handling capability, sufficiently low parasitic, compact layout area, and low leakage current.