ESD performance analysis of automotive application based on improved Integrated Circuit ESD model

Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) is a major constraint for electronic product design and especially in automotive domain, where requirements can reach levels up to 25 kV. The reference standard cited in most of carmakers specification is the ISO 10605. Historically product design was mainly based on experience and experiments, but recent works started to develop modeling and simulation capabilities to justify the design. These approaches consist in black box modeling techniques based on characteristics extracted on the device to be modeled. Without demonstrated link with the physics, these modeling techniques are nevertheless the only acceptable and efficient method for concrete industrial deployment. The practical implementation of these Integrated Circuit (IC) models induced some issues, especially under Pspice being the targeted tool for our simulation. Divergences issues frequently occur during time domain simulation and were irresolvable with model proposed in (Rigour et al., 2009). We propose in this article a new implementation of the model in Pspice, as well as an updated general approach for black box model definition and generation. A practical example is used to demonstrate the capability of our model.