Conductive floor and footwear system as primary protection against human body model ESD event

The purpose of this paper is to study the elimination of wrist straps for personnel handling ESD sensitive devices (ESDS) in an ESD protected area (EPA). To achieve this, the static charge generation by personnel in walking, sitting, and standing up from a sitting position without using wrist straps was investigated. The result shows that wrist straps can be eliminated for grounding personnel because the static voltage generated is well below the 100 V required by the new IEC61340-5-1 international standard for safe handling of ESDS. Hence, only the conductive floor and footwear system is used as primary protection against HBM ESD events in Siemens Malacca.