Hallo Bartosz,

I agree with your story. I experienced (and heard above) the same over and over again. But I would discuss the following line:

If the chip is "in air", the only charge it can unload or accept is equal to its capacitance. Not much current, not much energy.

Unfortunately, there IS much current and much energy:
Assume you have the chip hanging in air with no connection to anything. Now approach this chip by an object that carries an extreme positive charge. Assume fo instance that you walked across the carpet with rubber shoes and approach your finger to one of the pins of chip. Assume that between your body and the surrounding universe a potential difference exists now of about 20kV.
Then, from your finger tip an enormeous electro-statical field emanates. This field causes a violent force to all charged particles in the die. But because only the electrons are free movable, all the electrons begin to flow directly towards your finger tip. Positive charges stay where they are, because the are captured in the crytsal lattice. In german we call this charge separation inside an object by an external applied electro-static field: 'Influenz'.

That the electrons are movable must be corrected: The die does not only consist of a piece of metal, where the electrons can flow in any direction. The die contains, of course, thousands of pn junctions. Additionally, these pn junctions are isolated from each other by donated substrates or isolating silicon dioxid layers, etc. Means, the electrons can only move within their local regions of low impedance. But the enormous electro-statical field develops so violent forces on them, that they begin even to cross these barriers, means they are pressed into the pn junctions and into the isolating barriers and by this destroy them. It's comparable to what happens if a pn juncion is reverse biased and maximum reverse voltage is heavily overranged: The pn junction begins to zenering or avalanching causing a very unsane current to flow. And if the electro-statical field is strong enough, then this current can totally destroy the chip.
It's as if you bombard the chip with high energy electrons in a particle accelerator. And you can even estimate the energy of these electrons very easily, if you measure it in eV: An electron which moves along an electro-statical field of 20kV gains a kinetic energy of 20keV.

Keep in mind, that this destroying current will only flow inside the die! No detectable current flows from or to the die, unless arcing occurs, of course. The chip dies quietly...

Keep also in mind, that your charged finger does not necessarily need to directly touch the chip!!! It's the electro-statical field what destroys...


Kai