EMC fundamentals — ESD

Charge separation leads to high voltages, walking, sitting up from a chair and removing a sweater are typical situations Removing a sweater can easily lead to 20kV in dry air System level ESD testing is based on the human-metal ESD ESD testing can be performed in contact and air discharge mode. Contact mode must be applied to conductive surfaces. Failures can be caused by current and by fields. Most damage is caused by current, except, fields can also cause latch up. In most cases TVS are the right choices for overvoltage protection. Soft failure root cause analysis can be performed using local scanning, locally injecting fields from a fast (< 1ns) rise time pulse generator