• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.27 no.11
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• pp.686-689
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• 2014

Electrostatic discharge has been considered as a major reliability problem in the semiconductor industry. ESD reliability is an important issue for these products. Therefore, each I/O (Input/Output) PAD must be designed with a protection circuitry that creates a low impedance discharge path for ESD current. This paper presents a novel Lateral Insulated Gate Bipolar (LIGBT)-based ESD protection circuit with latch-up immunity and high robustness. The proposed circuit is fabricated by using 0.18 um BCD (bipolar-CMOS-DMOS) process. Also, TLP (transmission line pulse) I-V characteristic of proposed circuit is measured. In the result, the proposed ESD protection circuit has latch-up immunity and high robustness. These characteristics permit the proposed circuit to apply to power clamp circuit. Consequently, the proposed LIGBT-based ESD protection circuit with a latch-up immune characteristic can be applied to analog integrated circuits.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.59 no.11
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• pp.2089-2092
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• 2010

There are many cases that interrupt the production process because of malfunctions caused by electronic circuit boards which control equipment, but it is difficult to distinctly identify the causes in many cases. Especially, CMOS devices with the control logic circuit return automatically to normal state after their own faults. Therefore it is not easy to analyze the problems with electronic circuit boards. Recently, nuclear power plant experienced a failure due to the malfunction of electronic circuit boards and it was identified that the reason of the malfunction was because of latch-up phenomenon caused by external surge in electronic devices. This paper presents the causes and the phenomenon of latch-up by experiment and also a way using counter EMF diodes, noise filters and surge protective devices to prevent latch-up phenomenon from electronic circuit boards, finally confirms the effectiveness of the result by experiment.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.38 no.11
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• pp.1215-1220
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• 2014

Breaking time is an important performance indicator of a circuit breaker. Thus, the operating mechanism of the circuit breaker should be optimized for reducing the breaking time. The operating mechanism in a gas circuit breaker is made up of several latches. Specifically, the geometry and relative positions of latches influence the dynamic behaviors of the operating mechanism. In this study, a three-stage latch operating mechanism is analyzed on the basis of the verified multibody dynamics model constructed using the MSC.ADAMS program. The relative positions and lengths of latches are selected as design variables. The dominant design variables are selected by a design study. Optimization is performed using a genetic algorithm (GA). The study results demonstrate that the performance of the circuit breaker improves by about 22.5.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.58-64
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• 2013

In this paper, two new flip-flop circuits with PCRAM latches that are FF-1 and FF-2, respectively, are proposed not to waste leakage during sleep time. Unlike the FF-1 circuit that has a normal PCRAM latch, the FF-2 circuit has a selective write latch that can reduce the switching activity in writing operation to save switching power at sleep-in moment. Moreover, a sequential sleep-in control is proposed to reduce the rush current peak that is observed at the sleep-in moment. From the simulation of storing '000000' to the PCRAM latch, we could verify that the proposed FF-1 and FF-2 consume smaller power than the conventional 45-nm FF if the sleep time is longer than $465{\mu}s$ and $95{\mu}s$, respectively, at $125^{\circ}C$. For the rush current peak, the sequential sleep-in control could reduce the current peak as much as 77%.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.25-30
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• 2014

The dynamic characteristics of a gas circuit breaker depend on the underlying high-speed operating mechanism with a spring-actuated latch system. Many studies have been carried out to reduce the breaking time of circuit breakers. In this study, the optimum latch contour design is determined for reducing the breaking time of a circuit breaker. A multi-body dynamic model of the latch is established for analyzing the dynamic behaviors of the circuit breaker by using the MSC/ADAMS program. Simulation results are matched against experimental data. VisualDoc is employed for determining the optimal latch contour. From the optimum design, the breaking time of a gas circuit breaker is improved by about 8.6%.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.07b
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• pp.1181-1184
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• 2003

This paper proposes a new Sense Amplifier for MRAM. Current Sense Amplifier employs a latch-type circuit to amplify a signal from the selected memory cell. The proposed Sense Amplifier simplifies the circuit by amplifying the signal using cross-coupled PMOS transistors. It shows the same operation speed as the latch-type Sense Amplifier in simulation and occupies only 85% of the area taken by the latch-type Sense Amplifier.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1998.10a
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• pp.779-782
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• 1998

This paper describes a high-speed Dual-modulus Prescaler (DMP) for RF mobile communication systems with pulse remover using selective latch technique. This circuit achieves high speed and low power consumption by reducing full speed flip-flops and using a selective latch. The proposed DMP consists of only one full speed flip-flop, a selective latch, conventional flip-flops, and a control gate. In order to ensure the timing of control signal, duty cycle problem and propagation delay must be considered. The failling edgetriggered flip-flops alleviate the duty cycle problem andthis paper shows that the propagation delay of control signal doesn't matter. The maximum operating frequency of the proposed DMP with 0.6um CMOS technology is up to 2.2㎓ at 3.3V power supply and the circuit consumes 5.24mA.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.61 no.3
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• pp.422-426
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• 2012

Transient radiation is emitted during a nuclear explosion. Transient radiation causes a fatal error in the CMOS circuit as a Upset and Latch-up. In this paper, transient radiation NMOS, PMOS, INVERTER SPICE model was proposed on the basisi of transient radiation effects analysis using TCAD(Technology Computer Aided Design). Photocurrent generated from the MOSFET internal PN junction was expressed to the current source and Latch-up phenomenon in the INVERTER was expressed to parasitic thyristor for the transient radiation SPICE model. For example, the proposed transient radiation SPICE model was applied to CMOS NAND circuit. SPICE simulated characteristics were similar to the TCAD simulation results. Simulation time was reduced to 120 times compared to TCAD simulation.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.8
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• pp.121-127
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• 2013

Memory devices including SRAM and DRAM are very susceptible to high energy radiation particles in the space. Abnormal operation of the devices is caused by SEE or TID. This paper presents a method to estimate proton SEU cross section representing the susceptibility of the latch circuit that the unit cell of the SRAM and proposes a new latch circuit to mitigate the SEU. 50b shift register was fabricated by using the conventional latch and the proposed latch in $0.35{\mu}m$ process. Irradiation experiment was conducted at KIRAMS by using 43MeV proton beam. It was found that the proposed latch-shift register is not affected by the radiation environment compared to the conventional latch-shift register.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.67 no.6
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• pp.745-752
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• 2018

ICs(Integrated circuits) for nuclear power plant exposed to radiation environment occur malfunctions and data errors by the TID(Total ionizing dose) effects among radiation-damage phenomenons. In order to protect ICs from the TID effects, this paper proposes a radiation-hardening of the logic circuit(D-latch) which used for the data synchronization and the clock division in the ICs design. The radiation-hardening technology in the logic device(NAND) that constitutes the proposed RH(Radiation-hardened) D-latch is structurally more advantageous than the conventional technologies in that it keeps the device characteristics of the commercial process. Because of this, the unit cell based design of the RH logic device is possible, which makes it easier to design RH ICs, including digital logic circuits, and reduce the time and cost required in RH circuit design. In this paper, we design and modeling the structure of RH D-latch based on commercial $0.35{\mu}m$ CMOS process using Silvaco's TCAD 3D tool. As a result of verifying the radiation characteristics by applying the radiation-damage M&S (Modeling&Simulation) technique, we have confirmed the radiation-damage of the standard D-latch and the RH performance of the proposed D-latch by the TID effects.