Gate Grounded n-MOS Sensibility to Ionizing Dose

Abstract

ESD (electrostatic discharges) is one of the most critical event leading most of the time to the destruction of integrated circuits. Nowadays, most of the integrated circuits are design with inbuilt ESD protections structures that have to be electrically neutral. TID degradation on Gate Grounded nMOSFETs is investigated in this paper. Degradation hypothesis and structure analysis performed on GGnMOS from Microchip have highlighted some possible failure that can lead to an inability to protect properly an integrated circuit, or to an increase of the leakage current of those structure.