Evolution of ESD Robust IC Design: How ESD design and ESD control have changed our industry

Since the invention of the integrated circuit (IC) in 1958, advances in integration progressed rapidly, proliferating across industries and applications. As early as 1970, the technical community recognized the threat of electrostatic discharge (ESD) to the yield and reliability of the nascent semiconductor industry. Publications from reliability conferences from this era linked the high early life failure rate to the lack of ESD control in the assembly lines
[1]
. Freeman and Beall
[1]
empirically verified their hypothesis by testing good parts with an “equivalent circuit model for a charged human body,” producing identical failure modes with a charging voltage of 1.5–2 kV. Subsequently, they established a combination of static control and susceptibility guidelines for components to mitigate the risk of ESD damage, defining the concept of an
ESD-controlled area
. Interestingly, before this work, ESD was not considered damaging if a human could not feel it strongly—which occurs at levels higher than 10 kV. One of the first innovations and patents in ESD protection (U.S. Patent 3,648,127) was granted to M. Lenzlinger in 1972 for inventing a method for engineering breakdown and dynamic on-resistance for gate protection devices and experimentally demonstrating better gate oxide protection against simulated static events. Since 1972, there have been more than 100,000 U.S. patents issued in the ESD domain.