Commercial USB IC Soft-Failure Sensitivity Measurement Method and Trend Analysis

An electrostatic discharge (ESD) happening on a commercial electronic device such as at the USB interface can induce soft-failure in the IC and disturb the normal operation of the device. This paper investigates the soft-failure behaviors of 14 commercial USB devices in order to obtain an insight into the overall sensitivity trend of such systems and into the severity of different soft-failures. A new analysis method is proposed in this paper. The considered parameters in this study include: injected pulse widths, pulse rise time, current levels, USB standard of the DUTS, etc. Soft-failures started to occur at a current of around 1 A, and nearly all configurations would show errors above 6 A.