Analysis and Measurement of Signal Distortion due to ESD Protection Circuits

Abstract

Electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection circuits typi- cally contain a significant amount of nonlinear capacitance. At high frequencies and large amplitudes, this nonlinearity can degrade the signal integrity at the input pins of high performance mixed signal ICs, such as analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). This study provides a theoretical analysis of this problem as well as exper- imental results that quantify typical distortion levels introduced by state-of-the-art ESD structures. It is show