A CAD integrated solution of substrate modeling for industrial IC design

Abstract

Smart Power IC integrating high voltage devices with low voltage control blocks becomes more and more popular in automotive industry recently. Minority carriers injected into the substrate during switching of high power stages cause malfunction of sensitive nearby low voltage devices. Sometimes this may be destructive due to the presence of triggered latch up. The minority carriers propagation is extremely hard to model and difficult to predict using existing commercial standard design flow. In this paper, we propose a Computer-Aided-Design solution to characterise the substrate vertical and lateral parasitic for Smart Power IC in automotive applications. Investigation of complex benchmark structures is presented. SPICE simulations are performed for extracted 3D substrate netlist and compared to measurements. Good fitting between simulation and measurement validates the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed CAD tool.