THE EFFECT OF ELECTROSTATIC DISCHARGE ON MICROCONTROLLER DIAGNOSTIC CIRCUIT

The continuing demand for more performance, complexity and cost reduction require the semiconductor industry to develop microcontrollers with both high density design technology and higher clock frequencies. This has intrinsically increased the noise emission and noise sensitivity. The microcontrollers are affected by transient events like electrostatic discharge. The effect of the Human Body Model of electrostatic discharge to the MC9S08QE128-8 bit microcontroller circuit is analysed. The hardware circuitry has been configured to act like a diagnostic tool, indicating an error if the hardware fails. Direct air discharge has been conducted on the connector GPIO pins in the neighbourhood of the active I/O pins. The results show that the impedance of the board becomes very low implying there is a dead short between the VDD and the VSS rails