Electrostatic Discharges (ESD) is a significant hazard to electronic components and systems. Based on a specific process technology, a given circuit application requires a customized ESD consideration that meets all the requirements such as the core circuit's operating condition, maximum accepted leakage current, breakdown conditions for the process and overall device sizes. In every several years, there will be a new process technology becomes mature, and most of those new technology requires custom design of effective ESD protection solution. And usually the design window will shrinks due to the evolving of the technology becomes smaller and smaller. The ESD related failure is a major IC reliability concern and results in a loss of millions dollars each year in the semiconductor industry. To emulate the real word stress condition, several ESD stress models and test methods have been developed. The basic ESD models are Human Body model (HBM), Machine Mode (MM), and Charge Device Model (CDM). For the system-level ESD robustness, it is defined by different standards and specifications than component-level ESD requirements. International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61000-4-2 has been used for the product and the Human Metal Model (HMM) has been used for the system at the wafer level. Increasingly stringent design specifications are forcing original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to minimize the number of off-chip components. This is the case in emerging multifunction mobile, industrial, automotive and healthcare applications. It requires a high level of ESD robustness and the integrated circuit (IC) level, while finding ways to streamline the ESD characterization during early development cycle. To enable predicting the ESD performance of IC's pins that are directly exposed to a system-level stress condition, a new the human metal model (HMM) test model has been introduced. In this work, a new testing methodology for product-level HMM characterization is introduced. This testing framework allows for consistently identifying ESD-induced failures in a product, substantially simplifying the testing process, and significantly reducing the product evaluation time during development cycle. It helps eliminates the potential inaccuracy provided by the conventional characterization methodology. For verification purposes, this method has been applied to detect the failures of two different products. Addition to the exploration of new characterization methodology that provides better accuracy, we also have looked into the protection devices itself. ICs for emerging high performance precision data acquisition and transceivers in industrial, automotive and wireless infrastructure applications require effective and ESD protection solutions. These circuits, with relatively high operating voltages at the Input/Output (I/O) pins, are increasingly being designed in low voltage Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technologies to meet the requirements of low cost and large scale integration. A new dual-polarity SCR optimized for high bidirectional blocking voltages, high trigger current and low capacitance is realized in a sub 3-V, 180-nm CMOS process. This ESD device is designed for a specific application where the operating voltage at the I/O is larger than that of the core circuit. For instance, protecting high voltage swing I/Os in CMOS data acquisition system (DAS) applications. In this reference application, an array of thin film resistors voltage divider is directly connected to the interface pin, reducing the maximum voltage that is obtained at the core device input down to ± 1-5 V. Its ESD characteristics, including the trigger voltage and failure current, are compared against those of a typical CMOS-based SCR. Then, we have looked into the ESD protection designs into more advanced technology, the 28-nm CMOS. An ESD protection design builds on the multiple discharge-paths ESD cell concept and focuses the attention on the detailed design, optimization and realization of the in-situ ESD protection cell for IO pins with variable operation voltages. By introducing different device configurations fabricated in a 28-nm CMOS process, a greater flexibility in the design options and design trade-offs can be obtained in the proposed topology, thus achieving a higher integration and smaller cell size definition for multi-voltage compatibility interface ESD protection applications. This device is optimized for low capacitance and synthesized with the circuit IO components for in-situ ESD protection in communication interface applications developed in a 28-nm, high-k, and metal-gate CMOS technology. ESD devices have been used in different types of applications and also at different environment conditions, such as high temperature. At the last section of this research work, we have performed an investigation of several different ESD devices' performance under various temperature conditions. And it has been shown that the variations of the device structure can results different ESD performance, and some devices can be used at the high temperature and some cannot. And this investigation also brings up a potential threat to the current ESD protection devices that they might be very vulnerable to the latch-up issue at the higher temperature range.

Suffisante pour exécuter les algorithmes à la cadence de ces capteurs d’images performants, tout en gardant une faible consommation d’énergie. Les systèmes monoprocesseur n’arrivent plus à satisfaire les exigences de ce domaine. Ainsi, grâce aux avancées technologiques et en s’appuyant sur de précédents travaux sur les machines parallèles, les systèmes multiprocesseurs sur puce (MPSoC) représentent une solution intéressante et prometteuse. Dans de précédents travaux à cette thèse, la cible technologique pour développer de tels systèmes était les FPGA. Or les résultats ont montré les limites de cette cible en terme de ressource matérielles et en terme de performance (vitesse notamment). Ce constat nous amène à changer de cible c’est-à-dire à passer sur cible ASIC nécessitant ainsi de retravailler profondément l’architecture et les IPs qui existaient autour de la méthode existante (appelée HNCP, pour Homogeneous Network of Communicating Processors). Afin de bénéficier de la performance offerte par la cible ASIC, les systèmes multiprocesseurs proposés s’appuient sur la flexibilité de son architecture. Combinés à des squelettes de parallélisation facilitant la programmabilité de l’architecture, les circuits proposés permettent d’offrir des systèmes supportant le portage en temps réels de différentes classes d’algorithme de traitement d’images. Le résultat de ce travail a abouti à la fabrication d’un circuit intégré à base d’un seul processeur et de ses périphériques en technologie ST CMOS 65nm dont la surface est d’environ 1 mm² et à la définition de 2 architectures multiprocesseurs flexibles basées sur le concept des squelettes de parallélisation (une architecture de 16 coeurs de processeur en technologie ST CMOS 65 nm et une deuxième architecture de 64 coeurs de processeur en technologie ST CMOS FD-SOI 28 nm). / Smart sensors today require processing components with sufficient power to run algorithms at the rate of these high-performance image sensors, while maintaining low power consumption. Monoprocessor systems are no longer able to meet the requirements of this field. Thus, thanks to technological advances and based on previous works on parallel computers, multiprocessor systems on chip (MPSoC) represent an interesting and promising solution. Previous works around this thesis have used FPGA as technological target. However, results have shown the limits of this target in terms of hardware resources and in terms of performance (speed in particular). This observation leads us to change the target from FPGA to ASIC. This migration requires deep rework at the architecture level. Particularly, existing IPs around the method (called HNCP for Homogeneous Network of Communicating Processors) have to be revisited. To take advantage of the performance offered by the ASIC target, proposed multiprocessor systems are based on the flexibility of its architecture. Combined with parallel skeletons that ease programmability of the architecture, the proposed circuits allow to offer systems that support various real-time image processing algorithms. This work has led to the fabrication of an integrated circuit based on a single processor and its peripheral using ST CMOS 65nm technology with an area around 1 mm². Moreover, two flexible multiprocessor architectures based on the concept of parallel skeletons have been proposed (a 16 cores 65 nm CMOS multiprocessors and a 64 cores 28 nm FD-SOI CMOS multiprocessors).