Fred,

    I'm assuming the FET you're dealing with is in a TO package...(rivets and
all ya' know...), but there was a severe ESD problem that reared it's ugly
head at a company that I worked at a while back...the part was a through-hole
TO-92 that went into an assembly for networking equipment. This particular
assembly was one of the first boards that the company I was working for had
built for this customer, and they had been building them for over 2-years
without a hitch. Then all of a sudden, they started failing at test. The
failures were caused by ESD damaged FET's.

    Upon tracking things down, it turned out where they were getting "zapped"
was in a vibratory bowl feeder that we had just purchased from the vendor of
our prep equipment. We had a semi-auto pnuematic cut and form machine that we
bought a bowl feeder for,...we were prepping a mess of these parts because the
volume had increased for the particular product that these little jewels went
into. Problem was, it was causing a TON of static in the bowl while it
vibrated the parts down to get their leads trimmed. We wound up putting an
air-ionizer above the bowl to solve the problem...

                                                                          -Ste
ve Gregory-

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