The Emergence of Product Safety

Why doesn't anyone care about safety anymore?" a reader asked when he called me last week. "I don't see anyone writing about it anymore. I don't think anyone cares about it anymore."

We'd been asking a similar question. What we discovered was that it had been lost in the shuffle, but not entirely forgotten. At the IEEE EMC Society symposium in August, we talked to some of those involved with a grass roots effort to establish a product safety society within IEEE. "A top-notch product safety engineer must understand and deal with high frequencies and wide-bandwidth issues, multiphase power sources, risk analyses, forensic analyses, and system analyses. There's a common product safety thread through many engineering disciplines that the truly professional product safety person needs to understand every bit as much as an EMC engineer needs to understand Fourier analysis. Over the next decade, convergence, global marketing, and environmental issues will change the product safety landscape," said Murlin Marks, past chair of the EMC society's product safety technical committee.

And in the United Kingdom, the Institute of Electronics Engineers (IEE) recently issued a new guidance on EMC and functional safety, an area they consider much neglected and misunderstood. The new guide was developed in response to the need to help the electronics industry avoid poor designs or inadequate testing.

"This guide makes the point that meeting the EMC Directive and its standards may well be inadequate for safety-related applications," says Keith Armstrong of Cherry Clough Consultants. "These safety-related applications need a hazards and risk assessment using EMC and safety personnel who are competent to perform this task." Armstrong suggests that everyone involved with EMC or safety should read at least the first few pages of the guidance's core.

The guide is designed to help companies understand how to show due diligence with the CE marking safety directives. It should also help them achieve a rigorous defense under European Product Liability and General Product Safety directives, Armstrong says. Although these two directives are not as well known as the others, noncompliance could carry much higher penalties than CE marking directives, and the defense they require is much more difficult to achieve.

And, of course, we at Compliance Engineering are doing our part to address product safety more thoroughly. In the coming year, we will have an in-depth analysis of the new guidance. Moreover, we have slated articles on such topics as common design errors from miscalculated creepage and clearance, as well as a practical look at the need for simultaneous EMC and product safety testing. We will also monitor the progress of the formation of the product safety society.

For information on the society, go to http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/emcs/pstc/SafetySociety.htm or contact Daniece Carpenter at Daniece_Carpenter@dell.com. To obtain a PDF version of the IEE guidance document, go to http://iee.org/uk/PAB/EMC/core.htm.

Sherrie Steward
sherrie.steward@cancom.com

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