High performance NMOS active Zener and rectifier diodes

Abstract

NMOS based circuits to emulate diodes and Zener diodes are proposed, following the tendency to develop fully CMOS compatible solutions towards over-voltage protection and rectifier circuits, which are highly desirable to implement low cost smart power circuits and Microsystems for a wide range of applications. This work will present extensive characterisation, through experiments, on prototypes fabricated using three different standard, low cost, CMOS processes. Comparative analysis of the results supports prospects of implementing the basic blocks required by Power Integrated Circuits (PICs) and by Intelligent Power Devices, resorting only to NMOS switching cells. 658 0-7803-7116-X/01/$10.00 (C) 2001 IEEE

Experimental Approach for Reliability Analysis of Medium-Power Zener Diodes under DC Switching Surge Degradation

“…An application where Zener diodes were used where they should be characterized correctly is in the work of [5], where a reverse biased Zener diode was used for the open circuit voltage measurement of a solar panel. In another application, NMOS devices were used to emulate Zener diodes [18], where one would need accurate I-V curves.…”