New Industry Products

ON Semi Releases First In Family Of ESD Protection Devices

October 16, 2007 by Jeff Shepard

ON Semiconductor introduced the first member of its new, ultra-low capacitance, Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) protection family of devices. The new ESD9L is a single line ESD protection device that offers 0.5pF capacitance and what is described as industry-leading low clamping voltage. Available in what is said to be the industry’s smallest package for ESD protection, this part is suitable for safeguarding high speed data lines in portable applications such as cell phones, MP3 players, PDAs and digital cameras.

"Designers of portable equipment are challenged to find an off-chip ESD protection solution that combines low capacitance and low ESD clamping voltage in a package small enough to fit in today’s ever-shrinking portable electronic applications," said Lon Robinson, ON Semiconductor Technical Marketing Manager for ESD protection products. "ON Semiconductor has answered this challenge with the new ESD9L family of ESD protection diodes for high speed data lines."

In order to overcome the limitations of traditional silicon TVS diodes, ON Semiconductor has employed what is described as 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 to 0.5pF. The total capacitance of 0.5pF 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 7V 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 x 0.6 x 0.4mm. This ultra-small single line ESD protection package gives designers ultimate flexibility in size. This coupled with leading-edge capacitance and clamping voltage performance makes this device the premier solution for high-speed applications in space constrained products such as cell phones, MP3 players, PDAs and digital cameras.

The ESD9L5.0ST5G is available in a SOD-923 package and is priced at $0.15 per unit in 10,000 unit quantities.