Design of ESD Protection Diodes With Embedded SCR for Differential LNA in a 65-nm CMOS Process

Abstract—The pin-to-pin electrostatic discharge (ESD) issue for a differential low-noise amplifier (LNA) was studied in this work. A new design of ESD protection diodes with an embedded silicon-controlled rectifier (SCR) was proposed to protect the giga-hertz differential LNA. The proposed ESD protection design was modified from the conventional ESD protection design without adding any extra device. The SCR path was established directly from one differential input pad to the other differential input pad so the pin-to-pin ESD robustness can be improved. This design had been verified in a 65-nm CMOS process. Besides, this design had been further applied to a 24-GHz LNA in the same 65-nm CMOS process. Experimental results had shown that the proposed ESD protection design for the differential LNA can achieve excellent ESD robustness and good RF performances. Index Terms—Differential low-noise amplifier (LNA), diode, electrostatic discharge (ESD), RF, silicon-controlled rectifier (SCR). I