Another Tragic Victim of Electrostatic Discharge

Lots of end users tell us that rarely, if ever do they connect an ESD event to a failed product. But almost always, end users are not willing to invest the time in investigating the root cause of their product failure to determine if it was an ESD event or not. Most of the time failure is caulked up to “defective component” or “dead board”, the product is scraped, and manufacturing continues. So long as yields from production stay consistent and there is no increase in the amounts of returned product, additional time to determine the root cause of the failure is not needed. As this blog post from Chip Overclock notes:


It’s not really the semiconductor part that’s the issue here, although if I had fried an OMAP microprocessor or some other expensive or hard to get component, it might have been. The TMP36 costs two bucks U.S. or less. It’s the fact that my own carelessness cost me hours of my time. When you are self-employed and you bill by the hour, you are constantly aware of the value of your time in real dollars. Using a grounded wrist strap to protect against electrostatic discharge (ESD) would have saved me a lot of time and money.

To read the full article Click Here.


So how many product failures are due to ESD damage? Nobody ever really knows, but we have been told that about 50% of non-physical damage product failures in particular industries are due to ESD events. This number seems to work for most electronics manufacturers that we work with. Thanks to Chip Overclock for taking the time to get us a little closer to knowing how many product failures are due to ESD damage.

Leave a Reply