Real-Time ESD Monitoring and Control in Semiconductor Manufacturing Environments With Silicon Chip of ESD Event Detection

By  Chang-Jiun Lai and Ming-Dou Ker - Institute of Electronics, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

Integrated circuits are susceptible to electrostatic discharge (ESD) events. Real-time detection and alerting of ESD events in semiconductor manufacturing environments is the key to achieving well ESD control. Additionally, the magnitude and duration of an ESD event are strongly correlated with the specific type of ESD events. The development of a novel ESD event detector, integrated on a single chip and featuring a logarithmic amplifier, a magnitude discriminator, and a time discriminator, has been motivated by this. This detector has been designed and fabricated in a 0.18- μ m CMOS process. The magnitude of the ESD event can be detected and converted to 5-bit digital output codes, whereas the time duration of the ESD event can be converted to 3-bit digital output codes by the newly developed ESD event detector. It has been proven in field applications that the detected ESD events can be successfully transmitted to the ESD control center through the RF Wi-Fi module, enabling real-time ESD monitoring and control in manufacturing environments.

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