Pulsed behavior of polymer protection devices

Polymer protection devices are placed on circuit boards as chip devices to protect existing electronic devices from electrostatic discharge events (ESD). As there are no generally accepted standards for characterization of such devices, we used Transmission Line Pulsing (TLP) to determine trigger- and clamping-voltages as well as leakage currents. Using short duration pulses (less than 10 ns) from a Very-Fast Transmission Line Pulser (VF-TLP) gives information of the transient behavior during pulsing. The influence of the pulse width and amplitude on the current-voltage behavior was investigated on chip size polymer voltage suppressors.