Pin-pin ESD protection for electro-explosive device under severe human body ESD

Abstract

Electrostatic discharge (ESD) may introduce huge damages to electro-explosive devices (EEDs). This paper studies the pin-pin ESD protection for EED under server human body ESD. We use the PSpice and MATLAB to simulate the ESD of EED protected with transient voltage suppressor (TVS), varistor, semiconductor arrester and capacitance. Moreover, we achieve the decay time, current waveforms, voltage waveforms and energy integration waveforms of the EED during the ESD, with different protections. Simulation results reveal that TVS succeeded in protecting bridgewire EED against the pin-pin ESD, while other three did not provide adequate protection. The pin-pin ESD experiments have been performed using the TVS and varistor. Experimental results show that, using the TVS protection, the EED is not firing under the severe 50kV ESD voltage. However, by using varistor protection, the ESD protection capability increases by more than 90%, while the protection capability only enhances by 3.1%. The response time of the TVS, i.e. 10−12s, is much faster than that of the varistor, i.e. 10−8s.