IC damage by ESD peak overshoot: suited protection?

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ESD peak overshoot damages our IC. Which products or technology offer reliable protection with the lowest ESD peak overshoot? tips are welcome.
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Joost
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Employee
Hi SWhiley,

That is a good question. Infineon ESD protection R&D is very much aware of possible negative impact of the peak overshoots at the beginning of the ESD pulses.
However, to be honest: it is not easy to give a generally valid answer for this. But there are a few basic guidelines that you can follow:
Peak overshoot voltage increases with
- decreasing TVS device capacitance
- increasing TVS device breakdown voltage
Therefore, as a rule-of-thumb for minimal overshoots always choose the device with the largest capacitance and the lowest breakdown that your application can tolerate.

Further, the bond wire inductance contributes to the overshoot voltage during a fast current transient (what ESD is). Therefore, smaller packages have a lower peak overshoot than larger package variant of the same product.

Our new family of chip scale package (CSP) TVS diodes shows very low peak overshoot voltage, because there is no bond wire in this products. The first TVS device in this CSP family is the ESD200-B1-CSP0201 (see here), more will follow soon. An important feature of these devices is the very low peak overshoot.

I hope this answer helps to select the best suited TVS device for your application.

Best regards,
Joost
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