Electrostatic discharge is a serious issue for electronic circuits and if not properly mitigated can create short-term issues (signal integrity, link drops, packet loss) as well as long-term reliability faults. The DP83TC814 has robust integrated ESD circuitry and offers an ESD sensing architecture. ESD events can be detected on MDI pins independently for further analysis and debug.

Additionally, the DP83TC814 provides an interrupt status flag; Register 0x12[11] is set when an ESD event is logged. This interrupt can be routed to the INT_N pin using bit[3] of the same register. Register 0x442[14:9] store the number of ESD events that have occurred since power-up. Hardware and software resets are ignored by the ESDS register to prevent unwarranted clearing.