Hybrid simulation of ESD events by SPICE-like and finite-difference time-domain methods

In this paper, we describe a hybrid circuit and electromagnetic simulation technique for electrostatic discharge (ESD) events. First, we perform the transient simulation of an equivalent circuit of an ESD generator. At the same time, a computational domain without the ESD generator is analyzed by means of the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. The results from the SPICE-like and FDTD simulations are exchanged for each other by using analogy between the circuit theory and electromagnetics. The proposed method can reduce the computational cost significantly because we perform the FDTD simulation only for the reduced domain, which is much smaller than the whole domain. The adequacy of the proposed method is verified by comparing simulation results with measurement results.