ESD Basics

Charvaka Duvvury, Ph.D.
Texas Instruments Fellow

In this presentation the fundamentals of ESD will be introduced. Background is first given about the nature of ESD, its impact on the IC chips, and how it relates to the other IC reliability phenomena. This is followed by illustration of the ESD damage, a review of the effects of advanced process technology and the basic on-chip protection design techniques.

Charvaka Duvvury

Charvaka Duvvury received a Ph.D. in engineering science from the University of Toledo. After working as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in physics at the University of Alberta in Canada, he joined Texas Instruments in 1977. He initially worked in the Houston DRAM group as design/product engineer for the 4K/16K DRAMS. He then was part of the first 256K CMOS DRAM design and the Advanced Development group that worked on the 1 Meg DRAM with specific contributions in DRAM circuit design, transistor modeling, and reliability studies. He joined Semiconductor Process and Device Center of Texas Instruments at Dallas in 1988, where his work was on the transistor modeling of CMOS/BiCMOS technologies, and development of ESD protection for high voltage designs and sub-micron CMOS technologies. He was elected Senior Member of the Technical Staff in 1990, Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff in 1997, and TI Fellow also in 1997. His current work is on ESD development for the deep submicron CMOS technologies. Charvaka has made numerous international presentations on ESD phenomena and protection design, and is a course organizer for the UC Berkeley Extension Course on ESD. He has published over 75 papers in technical journals and conferences and holds 25 patents with several pending. He has co-authored books on hot carriers (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), modeling of electrical overstress (Kluwer Academic Press, 1994), and ESD reliability phenomena and protection design (John Wiley & Sons, 1995, and 2nd Edition in 2002). He is a recipient of the Outstanding Contributions Award from the EOS/ESD Symposium (1990), Outstanding Mentor Award from the SRC (1994), several Best Paper awards from the EOS/ESD Symposium and Outstanding Paper Award from the International Reliability Physics Symposium. He has been very active in the EOS/ESD Symposium where he was the Technical Program Chairman of the 1992 Symposium and was the General Chairman of the 1994 ESD Symposium. Currently he is a member of the ESD Association Board of Directors, promoting university education and research in ESD. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and also a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Sigma XI.