Engineering Commons^™

Esd Current Spread Measurement Using Mesh Structure, Jae-Deok Lim, David Pommerenke, Jong-Sung Lee, Byong-Su Seol

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

If a PCB is struck by an ESD the injected current spreads throughout the PCB and returns via attached cables. During the current spread a variety of effects occur: The current spreads on the main ground and power planes, couples into traces and IC lead-frames and bond wires. Further, the PCB and the attached cables can form resonators causing ringing at their natural resonance frequencies. Understanding the current spread onto a PCB, best, also onto the traces is of great importance for gaining insight into ESD related problems on products. A test setup has been created that allows capturing and …