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Comments on Is ESD overhyped?

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Is ESD overhyped?

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I have seen many engineers talk about ESD protection but I had never seen its effects myself. I made many small DIY projects and I have used bare hands to touch ICs and their pins,but nothing got destroyed(I mean ICs functioned well). Is it really that serious? Please tell and also its mitigating measures. I experimented with a mosfet just now by rubbing my fingers on its terminals. It is an n-channel mosfet called IRF510,and its datasheet is here . I observed that mosfet is working well by checking with a multimeter in diode mode i.e drain is connected to common of multimeter and source to positive one.

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General comments (4 comments)
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ESD is a very real concern on mass-produced goods with an expectation of quality and durability (i.e. those items for end-user consumption with warranty). So real in fact that there are numerous international standards dealing with it, including:

  • IEC 61000-4-2
  • ISO 10605-2008

Design houses will mandate ESD protection on all sensitive ports if these standards are to be met, and during product qualification an ESD simulator (or "gun") capable of producing kilovolts of discharge will be used to test every exposed surface on the product to ensure nothing gets fried if someone shuffles their feet or rolls across the floor in their office chair (while wearing a stylish Cashmere sweater) and grabs your product by something other than its handle.

There will be extensive ESD controls in the production facility as well - workers will wear ESD gowns or smocks, ESD shoes or heel straps, and will use ESD wrist straps when working with product. Trays carrying product (and parts) will be static-dissipative. In extreme circumstances, humidification will be fully controlled.

ESD is really about probabilities. Will one incidental handling with no ESD controls cause an incident? Maybe. Will thousands of incidental handlings without ESD controls cause your product quality and yield to plummet? Most definitely.

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General comments (1 comment)
General comments
coquelicot‭ wrote about 4 years ago · edited about 4 years ago

+1 for this very interesting answer. I ignored that there are mandatory tests for ESD with guns (well, in fact, I never thought about that).