engineers for ESD protection of components as well as professionals that are developing
ESD devices, circuits, and implementation strategies. To date, ESD is taught in individual
lectures, short courses, and tutorials. The teaching of a single lecture on ESD is inadequate
to provide educational learning on ESD and ESD engineering; the teaching of a single
lecture only trivializes the magnitude of the ESD discipline. Today, there are ESD books, but
they are not structured for formal undergraduate or graduate courses suited for physicists,
mathematicians, material science majors, or electrical engineering from a generalist
perspective which would draw a wide interest across the materials and semiconductor
community; the goal of the book ESD: Physics and Devices was an attempt to address this.
While the first book ESD: Physics and Devices was targeted for the semiconductor device
physicist, the circuit designer, the semiconductor process engineer, the material scientist, the
chemist, the physicist, the mathematician, the semiconductor manager, and the ESD
engineer, a second book is needed to address the details of the ESD job ahead for the
professional ESD engineer and the circuit design teams: the design team head designer, the
semiconductor chip floor-plan engineer, the power bus design engineer, the I/O design team,
the receiver circuit engineer, the off-chip (OCD) driver engineer, the phase lock loop (PLL)
engineer, the packaging engineer, the analog team, the radio frequency (RF) design team, the
modeling team, the device extraction team, the design rule checking team, the verification
team, the kit release team, the ESD kit release team, the graphic technician, the ESD test
engineer, quality, reliability, field application engineering, and foundry customers. For the
circuit designer and the circuit design team, a text is needed to arm the circuit designer to
achieve his objectives effectively. Today, there is only one book Basic ESD and I/O Design
by S. Dabral and T. Maloney which is an excellent text for the I/O designer. But, to train an
ESD engineer, a book is needed which goes much deeper into the ESD circuits and ESD
response of I/O circuits.
The cross-discipline nature of the ESD phenomena makes it a difficult subject to teach
unless it is taught from a cross-discipline perspective or as a series of disciplines which are
woven together carefully to build the understanding from first principles. This same dilemma
occurred in the early 1960s in the teaching of integrated semiconductor electronics. The
Semiconductor Electronic Education Committee (SEEC) was formed to address how to
teach an engineer integrated electronics in a world that separated the teaching of solid state
physics, devices, and circuits. It was stated in the Foreword of the SEEC series: ‘‘the
development of micro-miniaturization of electronic circuits has blurred the dividing line
between the ‘device’ and the ‘circuit’ and thus has made it increasingly important for us to
understand deeply the relationship between internal physics and structure of a device, and its
potentialities for circuit performance.’’ It was at this junction that the initiative to establish a
series of semiconductor books was taken, which integrated the understanding from the
fundamentals of semiconductor physics to circuits in a coherent fashion where each book
built on the prior book with a bottom-up approach. In the ESD discipline, this same dilemma
holds true.
This motivated me to move forward on the concept of not a single book, but a book series
on electrostatic discharge phenomena. The objective of the book series is to establish an
educational framework to establish an ESD discipline based on integration of physics,
devices and circuits—from the bottom upward—for a wide audience, not just ESD engineers
and ESD designers.
From this motivation, the first book ESD: Physics and Devices addressed the solid state
physics, electro-thermal physics, discharge phenomena, stability theory, ESD electro-thermal
xx PREFACE