Design of electrostatic discharge event detector

Electrostatic discharge (ESD) is an important and unavoidable event occurred in electrical and/or electronic manufacturing industry, such as hard disk drive (HDD), semiconductor, integrated circuit (IC), and etc. This phenomenon causes catastrophic and/or latent failures to electrical/electronic devices during manufacturing process. This will increase manufacturing capital and reduce client confidence on products. To ensure the product reliability, different techniques have been applied to prevent or reduce ESD events or protect electronic circuits. In this paper, we propose to design an ESD detector that can help us to know whether ESD event occurs in the considered area. This detection circuit could be called “indirect method” to restrict ESD problems to any ESD sensitive electrical/electronic devices.