Patrick Yue Carnegie Mellon University

Designing ESD Protection for RF ICs

Without proper electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection, RF IC products can suffer significant yield loss during manufacturing and handling. As wireless communication standards utilize higher frequency bands for the increased bandwidth, the loading effects on the RF I/O pins due to electrostatic discharge protection circuits become increasingly difficult to overcome. Today, trial-and-error remains the dominant approach for qualifying RF ESD protection designs, which is costly and tedious. The purpose of this seminar is to provide the attendants with practical ESD protection design techniques for RF ports from a circuit and system design perspective. The presentation will also cover ESD-related issues such as ESD models, qualification test requirements, basic protection network design, and ESD device layout considerations. As a practical design example, the ESD protection scheme employed in a commercial 5-GHz CMOS radio transceiver will be described.

Bio:

Patrick Yue received his B.S. degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in E.E. from Stanford University in 1994 and 1998, respectively. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include high frequency analog IC design, device modeling, and related CAD tools. He was a Consulting Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford from 2001 to 2003. From 2002 to 2003, he was with Aeluros, a startup company in Mountain View, CA, where he focused on signal integrity and modeling issues at the chip, package and board level for low power 10-Gbps SERDES IC's. From 1998 to 2002, he worked at Atheros Communications, Sunnyvale, CA, where he assisted in founding the company and contributed in various aspects to developing the world's first IEEE 802.11a RF transceiver in volume production. He has published over 35 conference and journal papers, and holds 10 U.S. patents. He was a co-recipient of the 2003 ISSCC Best Student Paper Award. He is currently a member of the Technical Program Committee for the IEEE RFIC Symposium.