Storage of EDS Sensitive Parts

[defaced]

How do you guys store your ESD sensitive parts? As much as I love the little gray/sliver translucent bags my semiconductors are shipped in, I'd rather not use them for long term storage.

Right now I've come up with three ideas:

• Spray paint my plastic storage boxes with conductive paint (probably won't last long)
• Cut conductive foam inserts for my storage boxes (this is great for ICs, but junk for most everything else)
• Buy conductive slide drawer thingies. Too bad I have to auction off a kidney to be able to afford enough to be meaningful. (Conductive Plastic Storage Cabinets)

[dai h.]

FWIW when I bought some opamps once I saw that they were wrapped in alu foil, so I've done that sometimes. I also bought some little plastic zip bags recently supposedly good against static (described as "non-static accumulating or preventing"--conductive??). Dunno if it indicates anything but they were blue (opaque). I think generally putting stuff (parts in general) in bags is good to keep out moisture, less exposed (at least 'til they are used). I had some parts in the open in a box under a desk, and a bit of condensation had built up over them, dripping into the box and corroding some of the leads.

[Steve Conner]

I just fling them in the little plastic drawers in our lab.

If it's an expensive or highly sensitive chip, I'll embed its legs into a square of conductive foam before I put it in there. Every so often, things arrive packed in this foam and I save it.

Some really sensitive things like RF MOSFETs, I leave in the bags/tubes that they came in until they're ready to be installed in something.

We have anti-static mats on lab benches by default, and wrist grounding straps that we use when handling the really touchy stuff.

There are two grades of static protection, "dissipative" and "conductive". The blue and pink bags are probably just dissipative. Conductive stuff is usually black, because it's heavily loaded with carbon to give it a lower resistance than the dissipative stuff.

[jrfrond]

I just fling them in the little plastic drawers in our lab.

Ditto. We stock thousands of parts and I've never had an issue with static damage. Here in NYC, especially on dry, cold days like today, ESD reigns supreme.

Most MOSFET's are gate-protected, and so are many static-sensitive IC's. In addition, at least here in our shop, all of our parts cabinets are sitting on metal shelves and coupled to the concrete floor in one way or another.

[defaced]

Cool! That makes life easy as I plan out my work station/parts storage. Thanks guys.

[Enzo]

I can only recall one time static reared its ugly head in our shop. I was working on a logic board for an arcade video game. Robot Bowl it was. My electronics shop was in the same room as the shop furnace and it was Michigan wintertime, so the humidity was non-existant. Normally this was still not a p[roblem, but we also had a shop cat. His name was Dave. When I was working on the board, Dave walked in and did the old cat brush along my pants leg, and WHAAAAAP, blew out an entire row of RAMS on the board.

Other than that, I just chuck parts in the regular plastic drawers like the other guys. When ICs come in those plastic tubes that protect their legs, I just leave them in them. I may cut the tubes to length to fit in the drawer. And I also save all those pieces of conductive foam they send parts in. When I have a bunch of 4558s in foam, it is not about static, it is just a way to have a neat storage arrangement.

If I have parts I actually think might need protection, a scrap of aluminum foil does it.

DOn;t like the silvery black baggies? Cut pieces of them out as drawliners on the floor of the drawers.

[gbono]

Sorry but throwing JFETs, schottky diodes, OP amps and God forbid PLDs into a plastic container without putting them into a nickel ESD bag or conductive foam is just asking for trouble. Sure you need a really nasty event (0 RH winter day and the perfect storm & combination of triboelectric materials) but it's the 500 V event where you can't feel the discharge that can causes a latent failure that eventually fails in the field.

I must have fixed half a dozen JBL LSR25P monitors for ESD damaged input summing OP amps. The problems always occured when the unbalanced (RCA) input jack was connected to a cable. I even did an "experiment" and zapped the tip of the RCA connector on the cable and found that the monitor became noisey and eventally failed.

Of course tubes appear to be fairly immune to ESD (as well as EMP).......