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Registered Member #3610
Joined: Thu Jan 13 2011, 03:29AM
Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 506
You don't want the humidity low, you want it high. I've seen the humidity here dip below 20% on rare occasions during cold dry winters.
I have fried RAM chips with static on a couple of occasions. The really annoying thing about ESD is that it often doesn't completely fry the part, it just makes it flakey and you end up with random crashes and glitches that are hard to narrow down. Old TTL stuff is almost indestructible, but CMOS is far more sensitive.
Registered Member #53
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 04:31AM
Location: Ontario, Canada
Posts: 638
The only time I have ever had static mess with electronics was with a desktop computer. I was wearing earbuds and as I stood up from the plastic chair I got a wicked static shock on the insides of my ears which also locked up the computer :/ There was no damage it just had to be restarted. Other then that I have always been careful but not obsessive about protecting my chips from static.
Registered Member #3766
Joined: Sun Mar 20 2011, 05:39AM
Location:
Posts: 624
I killed a 4017 with static once, thanks to my metal workbench. (don't worry, no HV on it) I might have actually killed the transistor that was switching the nixie tube, causing the voltage to hit the 4017, I'm not sure, I just know that there was blue smoke everywhere.
Registered Member #2261
Joined: Mon Aug 03 2009, 01:19AM
Location: London, UK
Posts: 581
I remember CMOS was easy to kill, but analogue IC's can suffer much more subtle damage: A digital instrument manufacturer I worked for had rigged up a simple constantly boiling electric kettle in the production line area because the increased humidity resulted in slightly higher performing instruments. It seemed that front end precision op-amp performance was subtly degraded by exposure to otherwise unnoticed static.
Registered Member #1403
Joined: Tue Mar 18 2008, 06:05PM
Location: Denmark, Odense C
Posts: 1968
I do only have one confirmed ESD kill in my little lab, it was a uC that i manually handled from circuit to programmer. After about 10 times it would no longer run or communicate. Lesson learned: always add a programmering port to you circuit.
Registered Member #3271
Joined: Mon Oct 04 2010, 02:29AM
Location: Canada
Posts: 159
Yes. Laser diode. Controlled test with a carpet and no ESD wristband to demonstrate the effect for lab staff. I also had a few neat electron microscope crossections with the telltale avalanche region to show at the time.
Also have a look at the pix on this site:
I find ICs much more rugged these days but still treat laser diodes and small signal low noise FETs with special care.
Registered Member #2939
Joined: Fri Jun 25 2010, 04:25AM
Location:
Posts: 615
ESD damage is real, never doubt that. The worst sort is the insidious damage that is not immediately apparent - everything appears to be working fine, then the chip turns its toes up some time later. Had one unbeliever at a place I worked, who took quite a while to see the connection between a constant stream of failures and wandering around the office with unprotected boards. Our tech eventually refused to replace chips for him, until he started using ESD bags.
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Has anyone actually killed an IC with static electricity before?
