Development of an ESD Risk Evaluation Method for SSD Installation in Host Systems

An electrostatic discharge (ESD) immunity evaluation setup that simulates the situation where a person inserts a solid state drive (SSD) to the host system was developed in this paper. The discharging current waveform in the situation where a user inserts an SSD to a host system was measured first and the current contributions were analyzed. The system impedance of the SSD insertion situation including a SSD and a human body was measured and the human body impedance was modeled as an equivalent simple circuitry. The proposed setup replacing the human body as an equivalent circuitry was validated by comparing the ESD current waveforms with those of real ESD event. To improve the reproducibility and the efficiency of the test setup, the entire test procedure from charging the SSD to inserting the SSD into the host system was automated using a linear guide and Arduino. The ESD current waveforms obtained from the established test setup were validated in several SSD Form Factors. The PCB design guide to hedge the ESD risk discharged through the Host interface I/Os were proposed was validated using the proposed test setup.