R63 Royalite®: The Right Material Solution To Prevent Electrostatic Sensitive Discharge (ESD)

From consumer electronics such as smartphones to life saving medical devices and essential transportation that includes cars and airplanes, practically everything we rely on in our modern world is made possible through microchips. These chips are basically the brains that allow these devices to properly function.

Protection during storage and shipping.

SPI Semicon, a subsidiary of Professional Plastics, creates products to protect chips, wafers and other sensitive technology from damage during handling, testing and shipping. Both wafers and integrated circuits can easily be damaged by electric currents, including something as innocuous as static electricity. This is why for storing or transporting these items the use of Electrostatic Sensitive Discharge (ESD) packaging is critical.

Long before a semiconductor becomes a functional chip, it must first undergo significant performance testing using a critical testing and validation tool called a probe card. These highly technological devices may feature over 50,000 contacts with a distance between contacts as little as 40µm (4 hundredths of a millimeter).

A SPI Semicon customer, who sells to one of the largest chip manufacturers in the world, came to them to design a large container for safely transporting and storing these probe cards. The challenge: Finding the right material to safely overlay the large aluminum tool and vacuum form it into two pieces for the probe card – all while protecting it from ESD during storage and shipping. This is when Spartech was brought in for their material engineering expertise.

Challenge, solved.

SPI Semicon turned to Spartech because we offered R63 Royalite® that solved a difficult challenge in their semiconductor business. This diverse material was the perfect overlay solution for the aluminum component for the probe card. The carbon-filled, tensile strain was exactly the ESD material attributes the company needed to repel any electrical charges. This ensured the probes were kept damage free at all phases of transportation and arrived fully functioning for accurate testing of semiconductor chips.

Success proven in numbers.

With R63 Royalite® as the material of choice for SPI Semicon, the sensitive probe cards were no longer at risk for short circuit failure due to ESD (including static electricity) during any shipping phase. Since the product launch back in 2021, SPI Semicon has developed their transportation solution of probe cards into a very successful ongoing program.

In just a year and a half, the company has stored and shipped nearly 1,000 units using R63 Royalite®. According to SPI Semicon’s Manager of Market Development, John Santoro:

It’s been a very successful program, and our end user is completely happy with the R63 Royalite® material and design. There have been no issues at all with shipping or storage.

With R63 Royalite, SPI Semicon now had a conductive, fire-rated PVC/ABS rigid sheet specifically engineered and proven for the dissipation of electrostatic charges. In addition, the Spartech material Meets both Static Decay MIL-B-81705C and NFPA Code 99, plus is UL 94 V-1 at > 0.066” listed, and features a surface resistivity of < 10^5 Ω.