The quantitative approach of EM-field to correlate components and products in terms of ESD soft error

Recent products have been pursuing the values such as high performance and miniaturization that are hard to coexist at the same time. Accordingly, a lot of quality issues such as structural stiffness guarantee, thermal diffusion technique and electro-magnetic compatibility problem are raised. Among these quality issues, a major evaluation method of robustness for external electro-magnetic shock is the ESD test from IEC 61000-4-2 [1]. Although the ESD is injected to outside of the product, the electro-magnetic shock from ESD can affect the semiconductors that are inside of a product in various ways. It can cause malfunction and in worst case, it can lead to destruction of semiconductors. Eventually, to achieve ESD robust products, it is very important to build protective circuits or structure for semiconductors like an application processor or a memory from electro-magnetic shock of ESD. For this reason, to build protective circuit or structure, the study of stimulus and response of ESD shock should be preceded. First is stimulus issue, which is quantitative measurement of the EM field affecting semiconductor. Second is response issue, which means quantification of response of semiconductors from electromagnetic field. Through this experiment, we can estimate fatal electro-magnetic conditions for the semiconductors. And, how to quantify the response of semiconductors to EM field crucial issue as well in that it can estimate EM field conditions which make the semiconductors to be fatal. These two quantitative understanding might be valuable information in the process of product development. Through this paper, the example for practical use of these measured data will be introduced.