Surprising patterns of CMOS susceptibility to ESD and implications on long-term reliability

CMOS electrostatic discharge (ESD) failures in a product where, by design, the device input terminals are not accessible to ESD led to this study of device susceptibility and an analysis of the long-term reliability of devices in assemblies from that production line. Some surprising patterns of device susceptibility are established and it is shown that the probability of long-term failure in devices whose electrical characteristics have been degraded by electrostatic discharge is small.