Cable discharge events (CDEs) have been found to be the major root cause of inducing hardware damage on Ethernet ICs of communication interfaces in real applications. Still, there is no device-level evaluation method to investigate the robustness of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) devices against a CDE for a layout optimization in silicon chips. The transmission-line pulsing (TLP) system was the most important method used to observe the electrical characteristics of semiconductor

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... devices under human-body model (HBM) electrostatic discharge (ESD) stress. To understand the physical characteristics and CDE robustness of on-chip protection devices, the longpulse transmission-line pulsing (LP-TLP) system is proposed in this paper and used to simulate the influence of CDE on Ethernetintegrated circuits. The secondary breakdown characteristics of the CDE protection devices under different layout styles and parameters can be measured and analyzed by the proposed LP-TLP with pulsewidths of 500 or 1000 ns. Furthermore, measured results using the LP-TLP system are compared with results measured by the traditional 100-ns TLP system. The experimental results with silicon devices in 0.18-µm CMOS process have shown that the CDE robustness of n-channel metal-oxide-semiconductor (NMOS) and p-channel metal-oxide-semiconductor (PMOS) devices in deepsubmicrometer CMOS technology is much lower than their HBM ESD robustness. By using the proposed LP-TLP system, one set of design rules for I/O devices to sustain high CDE robustness in a given CMOS process can be evaluated and built up for chip layout. Index Terms-Cable discharge event (CDE), electrostatic discharge (ESD), long-pulse transmission line pulsing (LP-TLP), transmission line pulsing (TLP). I. INTRODUCTION C ABLE discharge events (CDEs) are a critical reliability issue that requires recognition at all levels in the networking industry [1]-[3]. The characteristics of twisted-pair cables in different environments play an important role in CDE. Frequently changing cable environments also increase the challenge of preventing CDE. With more understanding on CDE Manuscript