What we need to protect our components or products? Electrostatic Protected Area (EPA).
Basic requirements to achieve EPA are:
a. We need to ground all conductors, including human.
b. Avoid unnecessary non-conductors.
c. ESD sensitive items to be placed in ESD shield packaging or containers when transport to non-EPA area.
How to implement EPA?
We can achieve by using “groundable” materials (i.e. materials that has electrical resistance of less than 10⁹ ohms).
These includes surfaces, equipment, tools, people and ESD sensitive components are kept at same electrical potential.
EPA can be from just one workstation, a specific area, a room, or whole factory floor.