EOS Prevention Strategy

Electrical overstress (EOS) can be avoided by means of the following 5 steps.

  1. Minimization of EOS sources in the design, handling and application wherever possible. The minimization of EOS sources is the most powerful measure to avoid fails due to electrical overstress.
  2. Risk Assessment of possible and potentially harmful electrical stress in the design, handling and application of ICs. The purpose of this step is to discover and anticipate
    risks, to identify their root causes, to quantify their impact and to define precautions in order to minimize unacceptable risks.
  3. Specification of the electrical characteristics of inevitable and potentially harmful electrical stress. These characteristics include time dependent current and voltage waveforms, repetition rates and mission profiles.
  4. Mitigation of the impact of inevitable electrical stress. This involves best practice and fail-safe design techniques as well as the decoupling of products at risk from their application and the co-design of products at risk along with their application.
  5. Root cause analysis of EOS damage due to unforeseen electrical overstress. In this way, new knowledge about the root causes and the minimization of electrical overstress can be gained.