The principle of distributed amplification is exploited in several commercial products. The amplifier on the right has an extremely wide bandwidth (click on picture for more details). But the part is also ESD sensitive. This is the case for most high-frequency designs. As the market moves to higher volume, high-frequency components, ESD sensitive parts can cause major yield and reliability problems. We propose a distributed ESD protection (patent) to simultaneously achieve a wide bandwidth and a high withstand threshold to ESD stress. The material below was published in the August/2000 issue of EDL (Electron Device Letters, paper.pdf). If you are interested in more details, please let us know your application by e-mail, and we will get back to you. A summary and further contacts can be found at the Stanford Office of Technology Licensing.