ON Semi offers ESD protection with ultra-low capacitance and low clamping voltage

The first member of ON Semiconductor's ultra-low capacitance, electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection family is a single line device that offers 0.5 pico farad (pF) capacitance and industry-leading low clamping voltage.

The ESD9L is ideal for safeguarding high speed data lines in portable applications such as cell phones, MP3 players, PDAs and digital cameras.

Traditional off-chip protection solutions based on silicon TVS diodes offer low ESD clamping voltage and fast response time but their high capacitance limits their use in high speed applications.

Competing off-chip protection technologies such as polymer and ceramic-based varistors offer low capacitance, but their high ESD clamping voltage limits their ability to protect the most sensitive ICs from ESD damage.

To solve these problems, ON Semiconductor employed a breakthrough process technology to integrate ultra-low capacitance pin diodes with high power TVS diodes into a monolithic die that can be used as a high performance off chip ESD protection solution.

This new integrated ESD protection technology platform preserves the excellent clamping and low leakage performance of traditional silicon TVS diode technology while reducing the capacitance from 50 pF to 0.5 pF.

The total capacitance of 0.5 pF makes the ESD9L suitable for high-speed applications such as USB2.0 high speed (480 Mb/s) and HDMI (1.65 Gb/s). The ESD9L clamps an input ESD waveform of 15 kilovolts (kV) per the IEC61000-4-2 standard, to less than 7 volts (V) in a matter of nanoseconds.

ON Semiconductor's integrated ESD protection platform uses proprietary design techniques to enhance clamping performance while maintaining a small die size enabling it to fit in a SOD-923 package measuring a mere 1.0 mm x 0.6 mm x 0.4 mm. The ESD9L5.0ST5G is available in a SOD-923 package and is priced at $0.15 per unit in 10,000 unit quantities. More information is available at www.onsemi.com.