ESD Protection on RF Transceivers: Impact and Improvement Strategies (pp. 177-192)
$100.00
Authors: (J. P. Carmo, J. H. Correia, University of Minho, Department of Industrial Electronics, Campus Azurém, Guimarães, Portugal)
Abstract: The discharges resulted from static electricity is the major cause of integrated
circuits fail and destruction. The electrostatic discharge (ESD) protections are the only
effective way to protect the internal circuits in the microdevice. This also applies to RF
integrated circuits but with the cost to change its behaviour relatively to their
specifications. One focus of this chapter is the identification and quantization of how
these ESD protections contributes for deviating from the targeted specifications. The
parallel capacitance and the serial resistance of ESD protections have a strong effect in
the behavior of RF transceivers when working at high frequencies. The usual
methodology for design RF transceivers is following an integrated form and including the
ESD protections. The ESD protections have direct impacts in the power amplifier‘s
design because the transmission range must be the initially specified one. This chapter
also presents two compensation strategies for RF transceivers designed without including
the ESD protections, which were included later and independently. All experiments and
simulations were carried out with a 2.4 GHz RF CMOS transceiver fabricated in the
UMC 0.18 m RF CMOS process.
