Remote ESD

ESD, or electrostatic discharge, is of great concern to anyone who deals with electronics. That’s obvious. What’s not necessarily so obvious, is that some times, you don’t even need to be all that close to the circuit board or component to damage it.

This article by Douglas C. Smith illustrates why sometimes just a wrist strap isn’t enough.

That’s why we don’t only use wrist straps, but also have a grounded conductive floor and use ESD jackets and conductive foot straps to protect the boards and components out on our manufacturing floor.

Here’s a video showing the dreaded ESD monster and us protecting your gear from him:

 

Duane Benson
Greased lightning is an interesting concept
Would it reduce power line transmission losses?

http://blog.screamingcircuits.com

 

The ESD Habbit, or An Unexpected Shock

Excitement is building here. In a little over two weeks from today, The Hobbit movie will be released to theaters. I’m sure everyone reading here knows the story, but in case you don’t I’ll spoil it for you.

It’s a story about Biblio who is, according to Spock, the bravest little hobbit of them all (google that if you don’t get the reference. You’ll be glad you did). Biblio is minding his own open source robotics business when the Wizard of Menlo Park (in CA, not NJ) invites 12 MCU designers over for a meal and discussion about the merits of hardware peripherals vs. bit-banged peripherals. The MCU guys convince Biblio to go with them to The Lonely Mountain Chip Fab and help them kill a terrible ESD Spike problem. Actually, it’s the Wizard that convinces the MCU guys that Biblio could help. The next day the MCU folks left early and Biblio ran out to catch up with them without even an ESD smock.

The ESD problem came from the North because it’s more humid up North and that tends to dissipate ESD. Our Terrible Spike didn’t like the idea of being dissipated without having first destroyed a few gold interconnect wires. The MCU guys need those gold interconnects to remain intact, so they brought a secret encryption key and enlisted help from the technician Biblio.

First though, they had to get past the TO-92 packaged parts that wanted to squash them into jelly or tacky flux. Fortunately, despite the bumbling of technician Biblio, the Wizard bought solder with no-clean flux which made the TO-92 parts stop moving once applied. After the TO-92 parts stopped working in daylight, they made a brief stop to inspect the last Homely Chip Fab in the Silicon Valley and see where the light sensitivity came from.

Passing over the Siskiyou Mountains on the way to Oregon and The Lonely Mountain Chip Fab, it started raining so they went into a cave and ate porc for dinner. Biblio ate so much that he fell asleep in the corner behind a chair where no one could see him and his buttons popped off. The missing buttons didn’t bother him too much because those ones had a de-bounce problem anyway. Luckily, the weren’t Grayhill switches or they would have hates Biblio forever, even if he used an achient gold Tolkien-ring network to bypass more porcs.

Biblio wasn’t the most skilled technician and he caught his pine cones on fire while trying to solder new switches into place, but the wizard was able to re-layout the board using Eagle CAD and an FPGA that could take many forms and would satisfactorily control the machinery and bears at the local honey production facility. But the FPGA brought them all into the murky world of Verilog and VHDL. That would have been fine except that the search engine spiders hadn’t crawled the eleven Wikipedia pages they needed to properly map out the clock routing.

The MCU guys got hungry and wouldn’t wait for Biblio to come back with pi so they rushed in causing so much in rush current that the lights went out with a snap. After eleven clock cycles in his new hall-effect switch, Biblio knew that the de-bounce problem would be gone except when he plugged the barrel jack into his Apple computer. But with no static guards to wine too, he had no choice but to use the Apple barrel jacks to get power to MCUs and switch open the flip flop made from a streaming-transistor logic gate.

Annoyingly, they split the story in two and the movie will end at this point. We’ll have to wait another year to see if Silicon Oakensubstrate is robust enough to kill the terrible ESD spike and pass final QC.

Duane Benson
One oven to reflow them all

http://blog.screamingcircuits.com/

Zzzzzzzap!!! Static be Bad

Engineers these days have so many issues to worry about just in component handling alone:

  • Do my parts need baking to get the moisture out before reflow soldering?
  • Are my parts in stock?
  • Are my parts real or are they counterfeit or secretly remanufacturerd?
  • Are my parts really lead free?
  • Are my passive components small enough to make it out of the holes in my salt shaker so I can put them on the PCB?
  • Are my parts too small form my manufacturer to handle?
  • Are my parts too complex for my manufacturer to assemble?
  • Have my parts been zapped by static electricity either before or after assembly?

Static electricity is really something that no engineer should have to worry about these days. We know how it gets created. We know how to artificially create it and we know how to guard against it. There’s really no excuse – especially from those that an engineer entrusts to build his or her designs.

People can carry around a static charge anywhere from several thousand volts to more than 10,000V, just by walking around. Joe Volta would be proud. Touching an electronic component or assembly the wrong way at the wrong time can discharge much of that through the electronics. Yes, most chips are better able to handle static electricity than the old 4000 series CMOS that could get zapped just by being looked at harshly, but pretty much any active component is susceptible to static damage to some degree. What makes it so insidious is that the damage may be done in handling or in assembly but might not show up until the unit fails in the field.

The whole world knows how to keep electronics safe (that’s an exaggeration, but at least most people in the Industry know how), and the whole industry understands the risks, so why would anti-static handling or packaging be an extra cost option? If it’s you’re own stuff, then fine. It’s up to you. But someone you’re paying? I don’t get it.

Take a close look at the picture on the right. If you ever get a tour through Screaming Circuits, you’ll see a lot of this. The floor is conductive. The bright green straps on the shoes are not a fashion statement. They’re grounding straps. The blue jacket is conductive. Parts and PCBs are protected from static through these means and others all the way in and all the way back out to the customer. It’s the right thing to do and the healthy way to do it and it doesn’t cost extra. It shouldn’t cost extra. Follow good static mitigation procedures yourself and make sure that whomever is assembling your parts does the same. That’s my two cents worth.

Duane Benson
Frankenstein was grounded through his neck bolts, so he’s okay.

http://blog.screamingcircuits.com/