PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF THE ELECTROSTATIC DISCHARGE

PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF THE ELECTROSTATIC DISCHARGE

The phenomenon of electrostatic discharge has been studied extensively in the last three decades, largely due to its increasingly important economic effect on the semiconductor industry, and several excellent texts are available on the subject from the viewpoint of integrated circuit design and protection (e.g., Amerasekera and Duvvury^[4]). The following is a view of the ESD phenomenon from the perspective of a product containing integrated circuits.