Direct charge device ESD test for magnetoresistive recording heads: study and standards ☆

The well-known Human Body Model (HBM) is not the most relevant ESD mechanism along todayʹs production lines. Damage will most likely occur from metal contact rather than from bare fingers. Discharge waveforms from metal-to-metal contact are of the order of 1 ns, while HBM is 150 ns. Direct-Charged Device Model (DCDM) can be used to simulate metal-to-metal contact discharge. We present here manual DCDM data obtained with disk capacitors. PSPICE simulation agrees well with the DCDM manual discharge data. As there is no standard for DCDM in the literature yet, we propose and define the first standard for DCDM testing, based on manual discharge and PSPICE data. We further investigate if existing DCDM tools meet this standard: ISI DCDM and TET ESD/CDM tools are reviewed.