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 in an ESD protected area (EPA). The static charge generated by personnel walking, sitting, and standing up from a seated position without using wrist straps was investigated. The results show that wrist straps can be eliminated to ground personnel because the static voltage generated using the conductive floor and footwear system is well below the 100 V required by the new international standard IEC61330-5-1 for safe handling of ESDS. The conductive floor and footwear system is used successfully as the primary protection against HBM ESD events in Infineon Technologies Malacca