A Study on Rise-time and Peak of the Transient Current Injected through Air Discharge of an ESD-gun

Electrostatic discharge (ESD) testing is prescribed in the IEC 61000-4-2, which is conducted by injecting the transient current through contact /air discharge of an ESD-gun. The current calibration in the IEC standard, however, is being made for the contact discharge because the current waveform injected through the air discharge is greatly affected by a gun approching speed. In this study, with two kinds of commercially available ESD-guns, we measured the transient current for the air discharge gun with arbitrary approaching speeds. As a result, we could confirmed that a similar specific relationship holds between the rise-time and current peak for each ESD-gun despite the poor reproducibility of the current waveform, which is also supported by other researcher's finding for the air discharge of a charged metal spheroid.