It is beneficial to have additional, external ESD protection and not solely rely on the internal ESD protection of a PHY. The internal protection of a PHY often does not provide the system level robustness greater 15kV which is needed in automotive. When adding discrete ESD protection, it conducts the vast majority of an ESD strike and works as a current divider. As such, an application design with an external ESD protection device can easily achieve system level robustness of up to 30kV.