ESD Co-Design ofmm-Wave RF Switch in 22nm SOI

This paper reports the first co-design analysis study of 28GHz broadband single-pole double-throw (SPDT) distributed travelling wave RF switches with 9KV on-chip electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection implemented in a foundry 22nm fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) CMOS technology. Aiming for highly reliable above-6GHz 5G mobile systems, this 28GHz SPDT switch covers the n257 and n258 bands of 5G systems. Impacts of ESD-induced parasitic effects and ESD-RFIC co-design technique for millimeter wave (mm-wave) switches were characterized. Si results confirm that ESD-Switch co-design is critical to mm-wave switch designs, e.g., improving the switch insertion loss (IL) by ~4dB for the 28GHz SPDT travelling wave switches fabricated.