Study on two types of commercial ESD simulators

In this paper, the performances of two types of ESD simulators (ESS-200AX made in Noiseken and NSG435 made in Schaffner) are studied, and ESD immunity experiments of a single chip microcomputer (SCM) system are made. The experimental results show that the differences between two simulators yield inconsistent test results though they both comply with the IEC61000-4-2 ESD standard. Therefore, besides the ESD current waveform, the relevant IEC61000-4-2 ESD standard should specify the discharge current derivative, related electromagnetic field in detail, and give unified specifications for the construction and configuration of ESD simulators.