Evaluation of Ground Terminal against Noise by Direct Power Injection Method

This paper shows that the immunity characteristics of integrated circuits (ICs) having large number of terminals to be evaluated can be evaluated macroscopically by measuring the strength against the noise of the ground terminal. A voltage reference circuit was fabricated in silicon-on-insulator Bipolar/CMOS/LDMOS (SOI-BCD) process [8], and the strength against the noise of power supply terminals and the ground terminal were compared. The strength was measured by direct power injection (DPI) method [1] at each terminal. The reference potential for applying noise to the ground terminal was a potential in a no element region separated from the circuit region by an insulator. As a result, it was confirmed that the strength against the noise of the ground terminal was same with the low strength of other terminals. In addition, similar results were obtained by a simulation.