ESD Damage
You're probably asking, why should I care about ESD? Well, the answer is because ESD can cause a lot of damage to electronics.
As we discussed earlier, any human activity is going to create a charge build up. Many activities create charges up to thousands of Volts.
By the time you feel an ESD shock event, you are already at 3,000 Volts. Electronics are sensitive and can be damaged at much lower voltages than that.
Electronic Componets
So how are components like capacitors or chips damaged? Let's go over a specific example to give you an idea.
If you ever dip into the details of how electronic parts are made, usually there are many conductive paths in the part and they are isolated by some kind of insulator, or dielectric.
The most commonly found dielectric is oxide since its easy to manufacture in most materials by adding oxygen under the right kind of environmental conditions.
esd damage
What happens when you introduce a lot of charge into a component is that the charge will usually be much higher than the dielectric can resist against, and the ESD event will short out between two conductive paths going through the dielectric.
This has a disastrous effect, because it means that the little "lightning strikes" in the part will literally punch holes in the dielectric layer, causing permanent damage.
Pretend we removed the top layer conductor from our prior example after some ESD events. We would be able to see holes that were created by those ESD events in the oxide layer. It only takes one to cause problems.
esd oxide layer holes
Then, over time, usually the oxide layer will start to degrade and malfunction. This is how ESD events create latent failures and defects in electronic components.
The damage may not be enough to show problems right away, but can start a problem that eventually cascades into a failure later on.
