Advances in ESD protection for ICs

Welcome to the world of Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) Reliability, represented in this special issue with seven research papers from different areas of this exciting research and applications field! Starting from the ancient Greeks, who first discovered static electricity and were describing its effects based on the Greek word for amber – g9kejsqom (ēlektron) – meaning ‘‘shining, bright, radiant’’, till today, ESD plays a major role in our ‘technological’ life. Nowadays, the ESD problems provoke wide range of scientific and engineering studies, which continuously face new challenges with the introduction of new semiconductor technologies and developing of new products and applications. The first three papers in our special ESD issue of Microelectronics Reliability focus on advanced studies related to developing new and improved ESD characterization techniques. The first paper in the series, by Maloney, describes an accurate analytical modeling approach for the Human Body Model ESD stress and tester waveforms, important for understanding the reaction and modeling the impact of the HBM stress mode on the functionality of the modern Integrated Circuits (IC’s). Complimentary, the paper by Smedes et al. studies some subtle effects related to the other major ESD stress mode – the Charged Device Model (CDM), and pinpoints some important improvements of the CDM testing affecting the IC product reliability qualification. The last paper in this ‘ESD characterization’ series, by Zhou et al., is focused on developing new characterization procedures allowing to achieve improved correlation between two measurement techniques for the ESD performance – the very fast Transmission Line Pulse (vf-TLP) and the CDM testing of IC’s. Once the ESD characterization methodologies are being reliably established, it comes the time for research in the area of improving the ESD reliability of different classes IC’s, as covered in the following three papers in our special issue. The work of Seo et al. inves-