Electrostatic Discharges (ESD) may cause various reliability issues in an integrated circuit. For example, an ESD failure may happen when a machine or a person touches the integrated circuit, or a charge builds up inside a chip. Consequently, high current and voltage may physically destroy the chip during the discharge. Specifically, when an ESD protection circuit does not function well and the high voltage ends up on the gate of the chip, the discharge may destroy the thin oxide of a transistor. If the high current passes through a metal interconnect of the transistor, the metal interconnect may also be damaged. Because of process scaling, the thin oxide is getting thinner and the interconnect metal is also getting smaller, which may increase problems associated with electrostatic discharges.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds