Wafer carriers are set up to be lightly conductive plastic for this reason. Likewise waffle packs for cut dice.
Any bonding station on the planet is set up for single potential builds.
Most ESD events happen in either crappy board level builds
(sloppy handling without mats-straps-etc) or most common is after its in the board and applications environment.
Limited contact with the outside world? Hmmm.... depends on the application its pretty tough to generalize that one.
vivkr wrote on Sep 2nd, 2010, 7:09am:Agree with you fully Jerry. But then, you might just be shipping wafers and your customer may be performing the final dicing and assembly for cost reasons. At any rate, you could always argue that if you are being asked to build in some unreasonable level of ESD protection, then there is something going wrong somewhere higher up in the system. After all, most high-performance chips nowadays have limited direct contact to the external world.
So I would say that one ought to have limited ESD protection for such stuff so that the device characteristics and performance are not adversely affected by exposure to the residual ESD during test and assembly, unless of course the device is intended for use in a particularly harsh environment for some reason.
But you can't tell that to your customer, can you?
Vivek