Companies that manufacture products in a clean environment typically invest a great deal of time and money ensuring the quality of that product. Hence the need for cleanroom bags. Protecting the product once it leaves the cleanroom environment and moves to the customer is just as important as having a clean manufacturing space to begin with.
Perhaps the most important thing you can do to ensure the quality and consistency of the packaging material you purchase is to establish specifications. Indeed, according to Dennis Lane of Ultrapure Technology (Suwanee, GA), “Most customers already know what they need. It's just up to us to get it to them in the right form, size and mil thickness.”
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Cleanroom bag vendors agree that consistency in the quality and cleanliness of the bag material is a primary concern. “You want to make sure you get [consistent quality] throughout the lot.” To that end, most clean bag manufacturers offer lot tracing and a certificate of compliance,” says Jerome Druss, executive vice president of Seco Industries (Montebello, CA).
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The disk drive industry accounts for the largest consumption of packaging materials. Because techniques for identifying contaminants, whether chemical or particulate, have improved dramatically in the past 10 years, the requirements for clean packaging have also increased. David E. Swenson, president of the ESD Association as well as a member of IEST, EIA and IDEMA, notes that “The cleanliness part is fairly easy to do. It's the outgassing and other chemical-based contaminants that are difficult to control.” Swenson is also technical service specialist at 3M (Austin, TX).
Stephen Van Someren, COO of Cleanfilm Inc. (Central Islip, NY), agrees. “Outgassing is a tremendous problem for people in the semiconductor industry,” he says. “These users are looking for products that will minimally outgas to avoid transfer of contamination to the surface of their product.