You may need to renew your industrial understandings about the relations and differences between the technical glossaries of electrostatics, electrostatic charge and ESD.
Definitions Review
Electrostatics: Electrostatics is the study of electric charges at rest. (referred by IEEE digital library)
Electrostatic charge: also called as static electricity. it refers to electric charge at rest. (referred to glossary document of ESD ADV1.0)
ESD: Electro-Static Discharge, it refers to the rapid, spontaneous transfer of electrostatic charge induced by a high electrostatic field. (Note: Usually, the charge flows through a spark between two bodies at different electrostatic potentials
as they approach one another). (referred to glossary document of ESD ADV1.0)
Relations and Differences
Based on the above definitions, electrostatics is the broadest term to cover all aspects related with electric charges. And the plasma processes in microelectronics manufacturing industries could be also included.
The industrial problems induced by electrostatics usually are caused by the movements of electric charges by the influence of the high electric fields.
Regarding the term of ESD, it is just one branch in electrostatics which is one kind of particular case of rapid transfers of electric charges by high electric fields.
The Broad sense of the industrial Problems of electrostatics in microelectronics manufacturing industries
To the broad sense to look into nowadays microelectronics manufacturing industries, the industrial problems caused by electrostatics could involve ESA, ESD, EFM and PID.
The problem of ESA (Electro-Static Attraction) group usually includes particle contaminations, process deviations by the effects of ESA. This group often could be seen in wafer fab of semiconductor manufacturing, TFT fab and module assembly of FPD manufacturing and other industries to process thin films.
The problem of ESD (Electro-Static Discharge) group usually refers to the microelectronic device failure caused by ESD events. This could be seen in the manufacturing industries of semiconductor (both the front-end wafer fabrication and back-end assembly and testing), Flat Panel Display (Fully ends of TFT Fab, Cell assembly and display module assembly), Touch Panel (both the front-end Panel Fab and back-end module assembly), SMT and equipment assembly (Display monitors, Mobile Phones, Automotive Units, Computers, etc).
The problem of EFM (Electric Field induced ions migration) group usually occur in the field sensitive microelectronics devices while the ions migrate within devices under the influence of the high electric fields. EFM usually induce problems of CD (Critical Dimensions) failures or electrical leakage of microelectronics. This group often could be found on the nano photomasks used in wafer fab of semiconductor manufacturing and TFT fab of FPD manufacturing.
The problem of PID (Plasma process Induced Damage) group usually refers to the insulating dielectrics (such as gate oxide layer, interlayer) failures caused by plasma effects. This group often could be found in the vacuum equipment utilizing plasma of semiconductor manufacturing.