Impact of the injection point selection during indirect application of ESD pulses according to IEC 61000-4-2

The repeatability and reproducibility of system level ESD testing according to IEC 61000-4-2 has always been of main concern for EMC engineers and testing laboratories. The effort over the previous years to identify uncertainty factors and evaluate their impact on the overall reproducibility has highlighted a variety of testing parameters and details unclarified by this Standard. One such parameter is the selection of the ESD injection point during indirect application of the discharge to the Horizontal Coupling Plane during testing. The impact of this uncertainty factor is evaluated by recording the current waveform for various application points and by simulating the resulting magnetic fields via electromagnetic simulation (EM) software.