The increasing mask costs of modern scaled CMOS makes silicon area precious. Meanwhile, the lowering oxide thickness seriously toughens ESD protection of RF circuits, pushing towards area-demanding inductor-based ESD protection techniques. This paper presents a transformer-based ESD protection technique for inductor-based LNAs. With no area penalty, an ESD protection level of 4.5 kV HBM is achieved. Introducing two-stage protection increases the robustness up to 7.3 kV, maintaining excellent RF performance. Further it extends the TLP protection level from 3.2 to 5 A. A noise figure of 2.6 dB is achieved with a power gain of 14.8 dB, while consuming 6.5 mW. The technique serves as a solution for low-area highly protected LNAs in deep-submicron CMOS
Borremans, J, Thijs, S, Wambacq, P, Rolain, Y, Linten, D & Kuijk, M 2009, 'A Fully Integrated 7.3 kV HBM ESD-Protected Tranformer-Based 4.5-6 GHz CMOS LNA', IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 344-353.
Borremans, J., Thijs, S., Wambacq, P., Rolain, Y., Linten, D., & Kuijk, M. (2009). A Fully Integrated 7.3 kV HBM ESD-Protected Tranformer-Based 4.5-6 GHz CMOS LNA. IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, 44(2), 344-353.
@article{bc518be772fc47cc8901119d69048b5d,
title = "A Fully Integrated 7.3 kV HBM ESD-Protected Tranformer-Based 4.5-6 GHz CMOS LNA",
abstract = "The increasing mask costs of modern scaled CMOS makes silicon area precious. Meanwhile, the lowering oxide thickness seriously toughens ESD protection of RF circuits, pushing towards area-demanding inductor-based ESD protection techniques. This paper presents a transformer-based ESD protection technique for inductor-based LNAs. With no area penalty, an ESD protection level of 4.5 kV HBM is achieved. Introducing two-stage protection increases the robustness up to 7.3 kV, maintaining excellent RF performance. Further it extends the TLP protection level from 3.2 to 5 A. A noise figure of 2.6 dB is achieved with a power gain of 14.8 dB, while consuming 6.5 mW. The technique serves as a solution for low-area highly protected LNAs in deep-submicron CMOS",
keywords = "ESD protection, low-noise amplifier, transformer, CMOS",
author = "Jonathan Borremans and Steven Thijs and Piet Wambacq and Yves Rolain and Dimitri Linten and Maarten Kuijk",
year = "2009",
month = feb,
day = "1",
language = "English",
volume = "44",
pages = "344--353",
journal = "IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS",
issn = "0018-9200",
publisher = "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.",
number = "2",
}