ABSTRACT
Electronics were first introduced into automobiles in the late 1950s. Modern automotive electronics can be found everywhere in automobiles, from engine control, driveline control, motion control, to instrumentation for vehicle performance monitoring and on-board diagnosis, to safety and comfort, to various in-vehicle entertainment, communication, and navigation applications. These automotive electronics applications can be roughly characterized into three categories: control, measurements, and communications. While automotive electronics have many different applications, generally speaking, they operate under rather hash environments and meet very high reliability standards. Particularly, automotive electronics are prone to electrostatic discharge (ESD) damages; hence, they require very high ESD protection specifications. The chapter explains to ESD protection issues for automotive electronics that cover ESD fundamentals, ESD test models, ESD protection structure, and ESD protection circuitry design. Since ESD transients are very fast and extremely short pulses with enough energy to damage electronic parts, some ESD protection meanings are needed to protect them.
