Industry Council on ESD Targets

SAN JOSE: The Industry Council on ESD Targets, an hoc group that is engaged in formulating guidelines for electrostatic discharge (ESD) specifications for ICs, is working on a new campaign and white paper aimed at involving more systems-level vendors.

According to many experts on ESD, a number of systems-level vendors seem to be unhappy with the new ESD guidelines set by the ad hoc group for ICs. The guidelines of the Industry Council on ESD Targets may affect adversely the integrity of chip designs and also overall quality of the products, some systems-level vendors fear.

However, the members of the ad hoc group on ESD assert that the new recommendations on ESD for ICs are proven and safe. The old levels of ESD, they argue, were “overkill” and added “too much cost” to the overall IC design.

One association in the industry, the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, has accepted the new standards set by the ad hoc council.

However, according to Charvaka Duvvury, a fellow at Texas Instruments Incorporated and one of the leading experts on ESD, there still remains certain misconceptions and misunderstandings among the systems-level vendors about the ESD guidelines. One of the concerns is about the reduced ESD target levels as well as about the interaction between component-level products and system-level products, Duvvury said.

The Industry Council on ESD Targets, set up in 2006, comprises about 45 major companies, including AMD, Intel, IBM, Freescale, ADI, Fujitsu, LSI,NXP, TSMC, Infineon, Samsung, Panasonic, Texas instruments, and Renesas. The group addresses the growing problem regarding ESD in the electronics sector.