1. A Radiation-Hardened and ESD-Optimized Wireline Driver With Wide Terminal Common-Mode Voltage Range
- Author
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Xichuan Zhou, Shengdong Hu, Li Mingdong, Huang Shalin, Fang Tang, Fan Liu, Zhi Lin, Xingguo Gao, Xun Xiang, Amine Bermak, and Xuewen Chen
- Subjects
010302 applied physics ,Nuclear and High Energy Physics ,Electrostatic discharge ,Materials science ,010308 nuclear & particles physics ,business.industry ,Circuit design ,Electrical engineering ,Hardware_PERFORMANCEANDRELIABILITY ,Driver circuit ,01 natural sciences ,Threshold voltage ,Rectifier ,Nuclear Energy and Engineering ,0103 physical sciences ,MOSFET ,Hardware_INTEGRATEDCIRCUITS ,Breakdown voltage ,Electrical and Electronic Engineering ,business ,NMOS logic ,Hardware_LOGICDESIGN - Abstract
In complex environment, the wireline voltage driver should be compatible with wide-terminal common-mode range, electrostatic discharge (ESD), and radiation interference. The most vulnerable devices in the conventional driver are the nMOS transistor and the silicon-controlled rectifier (SCR) against negative the ESD shock, total dose radiation, and single-event latch-up. In this paper, a reliable wireline driver circuit is proposed compatible with −7 ~ 12-V terminal common-mode voltage range. By adopting face-to-face diodes, pMOS/n-p-n hybrid driver, and Schottky diodes, the proposed driver circuit demonstrates significant protection level improvement for both ESD and radiation. Both the reference SCR-based driver and the proposed driver with the optimized circuit design and protection strategy are fabricated using a 0.6- $\mu \text{m}$ bipolar-CMOS-DMOS process. Due to a simpler circuit structure, the proposed output stage has about 10% less chip area. According to the measurement results, the human-body-model ESD level of 3 kV, total dose radiation level of 100 krad(Si), and single-event effect level of 75 MeV $\cdot $ cm2/mg are achieved in the proposed design to satisfy complex environment applications.
- Published
- 2018