Modeling and Design Guidelines for P⁺ Guard Rings in Lightly Doped CMOS Substrates

This paper presents a compact model for ${rm P}^{+}$ guard rings in lightly doped CMOS substrates featuring a P-well layer. Simple expressions for the impedances in the model are derived based on a conformal mapping approach. The model can be used to predict the noise suppression performance of ${rm P}^{+}$ guard rings in terms of S-parameters, which is useful for substrate noise mitigation in mixed-signal system-on-chips. Validation of the model has been done by both electromagnetic simulation and experimental results from guard rings implemented using a standard 0.18-$mu{rm m}$ CMOS process. In addition, design guidelines have been drawn for minimizing the guard ring size while maintaining the noise suppression performance.