Impact of pin configuration in IV characterization on ESD failure analysis

During ESD (electro-static discharge) tests, IV curves are measured before and after ESD stress to judge the ESD protection circuit performance. In this paper, we report that the judgment in this way may be misleading if the pin configuration of the power supply pins or control pins are not well defined. Experiments & analysis are illustrated on configurations of: 1) Vss and Vdd pins, 2) Vdd pins from multiple power domains. We recommended that industry standards define the procedure on IV curve measurement and pin configurations as guidelines for ESD tests.