Improvement of electrostatic discharge protection by introducing a spindt-type silicon field emission device

In this paper, an original Spindt-type silicon field emission device (FED) with electrostatic discharge (ESD) regulation capability is proposed. The fabricated FED characteristics, including process parameters, capacitance-voltage (C-V), current-voltage (I-V), and frequency response, are investigated. To verify its capability of ESD protection, we replace the metal oxide varistor (MOV) in a state-of-the-art protection configuration with the fabricated FED under the application conditions of system-level ESD tests. The measured results show that the proposed ESD protection circuit composed of a prestage gas arrestor, an intermediate resistor, and an introduced FED can suppress an injected ESD pulse voltage of 6000 to 3193 V, a reduction of 46.8%, whereas suppression is to 5606 V, a reduction of 6.57%, when using only a gas arrestor.