From one of my stencil vendors I heard that ESD is a much greater concern when using polyimide stencils. For that reason he doesn't sell them anymore, in spite of the advantages of polyimide.

Bye,

Daan Terstegge
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Personal website: http://surf.to/smtinfo

>>> Murugan Vasudevan <[log in to unmask]> 02/27 8:29 pm >>>
Hi technetters..
here's an early bird question for this week...this one
is regarding stencil wear. well, i have read in some
literature that a fully hard laser-etched stainless
steel stencil can last for more than a 100K cycles
without ay problem. Now, the problem is, we are
getting into this business of using a polyimide
stencil. it is giving great deposits, good release
characteristics, outperforms the metal stencil for our
application, etc. etc. BUT...the one thing that
concerns most of us is .."well, everything is okay
NOW...but what might happen lets say 50K cycles
after!?"..and i was wondering if anyone in this group
has any experience with using such a stencil?" if so,
i would definitely be interested in knowing how is it
behaving on a long term basis..

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