sbeebeCHARACTERIZATION, MODELING, AND DESIGN OF ESD PROTECTION CIRCUITS By STEPHEN G. BEEBE March 1998 Technical Report No. xxxxxxx Prepared under Semiconductor Research Corporation Contract 94-SJ-116 Semiconductor Research Corporation Contract 94-YC-704 Special support provided by Advanced Micro Devices, Sunnyvale, California Copyright by Stephen G. Beebe 1998 All Rights Reserved ii Abstract For more than 20 years, susceptibility of integrated circuits to electrostatic discharge (ESD) has warranted the use of dedicated on-chip ESD protection circuits. Although the problem of ESD in integrated circuits (ICs) has received much attention industry-wide since the late 1970s, design of robust ESD circuits remains challenging because ESD failure mechanisms become more acute as critical circ……