Most silicon ESD protection solutions in the market today are mainly designed for consumer devices in mind, but ESD threats also keep automotive electronic designers up at night. Not only are automotive designers worried about the “normal” ESD situations, but additional automotive specific events are a cause for serious concern one of which is a short to battery condition.
The short to battery event in automotive occurs during assembly, service or consumer use of these devices in the vehicle. During assembly and service, there is a potential for a broken or exposed battery line to connect to one of these interfaces causing potential damage to the ESD protection device. A good example of short to battery during consumer use is a USB cable dangling into the cigarette lighter socket of the vehicle once again introducing battery line voltage to the interface lines. The mere existence of the 12V battery network in the automotive environment puts an additional burden on the automotive ESD protection devices as they need to be able to withstand someone intentionally or unintentionally shorting these interfaces to the battery line. As a result, if the interface is required to withstand such a short to battery condition in addition to the ESD threats, the normal 5V breakdown ESD devices used mainly in consumer devices will not be suitable.
ON Semiconductor has developed automotive targeted ESD protection devices with this short to battery capability in mind, in addition to the rest of the high speed ESD protection requirements such as low insertion loss at higher bandwidth and very low capacitance for signal integrity.
Devices such as the ESD7002, ESD7361, and ESD7461 have a minimum 16V breakdown voltage to allow survivability in automotive short to battery conditions where the battery voltage can range from 9V minimum to 16V maximum. These devices provide very low clamping ESD protection while achieving very low capacitance for applications that may go into GHz frequencies.