ESD CIRCUITS AND DEVICES STEVEN H. VOLDMAN

Electrostatic discharge (ESD) phenomena have been known to mankind since the Greek Empire when Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages of Greece, noticed the attraction of strands of hay to amber, leading to the coining of the word ‘‘electron.’’ In the 17th century, Gilbert and Cabeo addressed the attractive and repulsive nature of electricity. In the 18th century, a rapid increase of interest occurred for scientists in the understanding of electrical physics—Gray, du Fay, Nollet, Musschenbroeck, Franklin, Watson, Aepinus, Canton, Priestley, Cavendish, Galvani, Coulomb, Volta, Poisson, Faraday—and continued into the 19th century—Laplace, Gauss, Oersted, Ampere, Davy, Ohm, Green, Ostrogradsky, Henry, Lord Kelvin, Joule, Neumann, Weber, Thomson, Kirchoff, Stokes, Helmholtz, and Maxwell. It was the discoveries made in the 1820s by Oersted, Ampere, Davy, and Ohm that began the basic understanding of electrical circuits.