HBM stress of no-connect IC pins and subsequent arc-over events that lead to human-metal-discharge-like events into unstressed neighbor pins

HBM ESD stress of no-connect pins is demonstrated to result in widely varying arc events. These arc events, in conjunction with the output capacitance of the HBM ESD tester, result in high magnitude current waveforms into neighboring pins. There is no clear specification to control these arc events and, therefore, stress of no-connect pins has been found to give no meaningful data for product immunity to HBM ESD.