A Radiation-Based Drive-Level ESD Test Method in Solid-State Drives

Recently, there has been growing interest regarding electrostatic discharge (ESD) failures of semiconductors in electronic devices. A system-level ESD test method based on the IEC61000-4-2 standard is widely used today. There is a need, however, for testing the ESD immunity of a solid-state drive (SSD) itself. Drive-level ESD test can reduce system dependencies and development time. In this paper, ESD failure mechanisms were divided into radiation and conduction, and the drive-level ESD test based on the radiation failure mechanism is proposed. A transmission line pulse (TLP) was used to produce a rectangular pulse containing high frequency components and a radio frequency (RF) coupler was used to apply an electric field and a magnetic field simultaneously to the SSD. This new method avoids the directivity issues of conventional field probes. Four Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) protocol SSDs and four disk array enclosures (DAE) were used to verify the new method. It is confirmed that there is a strong correlation between the drive-level ESD test and the system-level ESD test. It is expected that it can help to determine the liability of internal parts in case of ESD failure.