1) ESD stands for Electrostatic Discharge.

It’s a microscopic lightning strike which causes chip meltdown –literally (OK,  you probably did know that one but like a good golf instructor you have to go back to basics before working on developing a swing like Tiger).

2) ESD is the single biggest reason for field failures.

It dominates the highlight reel for “when chips go bad”  (probably showing on Sky One soon – that’s worth every penny of the monthly subscription fee, ain’t it?).

3) A human can generate a charge on their body in excess of 10,000 volts.

We do this through the triboelectric effect, when friction between two insulating surfaces – could be layers of clothing, could be walking in rubber soled shoes across a synthetic carpet – causes charge build up (i.e. electrons) in one material with respect to the other.  If these electrons are then given a path to ground they will discharge rapidly which causes a large current to flow. This current is like a river flood, and causes damage as it moves from source to ground (in this analogy the pressure of the water flow is equivalent to the heat damage due to the current flow). To give you a real life example, whenever you have received a painful tingle on touching a metal door handle the voltage on your person has been of the order of 10,000 volts. When  you hear the audible “click” then the voltage has been high enough to cause an air discharge meaning an excess of 20,000 volts has just left your body....

4) 90% of ESD field returns are  NOT caused by humans.

Most  ESD “strikes” (or zaps as they are more commonly called) which lead to IC damage are not caused by humans but by machines.  Humans do of course damage chips when they transfer their static charge onto the chip by touching the pins of the device . We call this HBM damage, which stands for Human Body Model damage. The chip industry recognised this issue a long time ago and for more than a decade now modern manufacturing facilities have user training and protection systems in place to reduce the charge levels we humans are capable of generating to the extent that operator-related ESD failures are quite rare. Instead, as we learned in Terminator the threat is the machines....

5) As we learned in the Terminator movies, the threat is the machines.

Machines have moving parts, just like us. Unfortunately for us, they can’t be re-trained easily, nor do they respond well to performance improvement plans or other company policies geared to improve factory quality. The bottom line is that unless they have been designed for today’s ESD sensitive devices – and most of them have not, being 10 years at least behind the curve - there is a good chance some of the components will generate charges just as we do, leading to chips being zapped when they move within a complex tool such as an automatic handler. And the worst part? Due to the differences in composition between you and a typical machine, the discharge is faster, MUCH  faster – a thousand times faster in fact. Oh, and it’s not only faster, it’s several times more powerful as well (think of a tidal wave which is 3 times as tall and 1000 times as fast as when we were talking about human  – that gives you an idea of the relative damage possible).  This much more serious issue is known as CDM, which stands for Charged Device Model damage.  The threat of CDM damage is a major industry issues and not going away anytime soon.