Industry Council on ESD Target Levels

The Industry Council (on ESD Target Levels) was established in 2006 when a few IC companies decided to understand why often during the product qualification process, at every corporation, passing the ESD test is a frequent bottleneck for customer acceptance. The pattern was the same – an IC product fails to meet the historically accepted ESD requirements, leading to several design cycles in order to meet the specified ESD expectations, and at the same time the task becoming more and more time consuming as the technologies advance. Simultaneous to this, most companies had the experience that for different reasons multiple products were supplied to the market that did not meet the same ESD requirements. No one observed reliability problems with these products. The ad hoc Council thus embarked on a mission to re-examine and establish safe and practical ESD levels that are necessary for manufacturing and the target levels that will have minimum impact on circuit performance requirements.

The original participants included Infineon, Texas Instruments, Philips (now NXP), Barth Electronics, Thermo-Keytek (now Thermo-Fisher Scientific), and Sarnoff-Europe (now SOFICS). What started as a small group that met in Belgium to brainstorm on how to approach the ESD qualification issues has now after five years expanded into a worldwide body of 40+ members representing IC suppliers, consultants, contractors, advisers, foundries, as well as some customers. Many in the industry were confused in the beginning if this is a new standardization body. Soon it became clear that the Council consists of individual experts who represent their own companies in conducting studies for the common cause and for interacting with the standardization bodies such as JEDEC and ESDA. The purpose of the Council is to make recommendations through publications of white papers.