According to the Directive, toys are defined as “products designed or intended…for use in play by children…

s the world gradually (and cautiously!) reopens after the past two years, we optimistically predict that 2022 will be like no other year in recent memory. Companies and industry professionals will go bold in exploring new ideas and pursuing previously unseen opportunities to bring new and innovative technologies to market. And, with supply chain workarounds taking effect, commercial and consumer markets will bounce back in ways that would have been the stuff of fantasies pre-pandemic.

In this promising time, your ongoing personal efforts to refresh or expand your professional and technical knowledge are more important than ever. So, as 2022 begins, we’ve once again queried training resources throughout our industry to provide you with an overview of free or affordable solutions to meet your training goals in the new year. In this article, you’ll find sources of compliance-related seminars, workshops, and other types of training, offered live, including both virtual and in-person options, as well as pre-recorded webinars and on-demand training offerings.

uch has been written about failures due to ground potential rise (GPR). So, is there anything more to say? Well yes. What has been written has generally been about single houses with multiple grounds. But often there is not just a single house, but multiple houses all potentially interconnected via a single piece of equipment. For example, in homes connected to a distribution point unit (DPU) (see Figure 1) the DPU is often a fiber-to-the distribution point (FTTdp) unit, or a digital subscriber line access multiplexer (DSLAM). So, what happens in this case?

Well, what could happen is insulation failure. This kind of failure was discussed in a 2011 study by the Japanese telecommunications company Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT). That company had a problem. About 0.05% of their optical network terminal/home gateway ONT/HGW boxes stopped working due to insulation failure. Now 0.05% doesn’t sound like much, but with 15 million installed devices, that amounted to 7500 units per year. Their research showed that the 0.05% failure rate corresponded to a 7.7 kV surge. Assuming that 0.05% (or less) is an acceptable failure rate, could GPR cause the corresponding 7.7 kV insulation failure?

ne of the key issues that must be decided by any manufacturer when designing new products or improving current products is how safe is safe enough and whether there is a reasonable alternative design that can be adopted at a reasonable cost. Unfortunately, the law and standards don’t answer the question. And a risk assessment, although helpful in quantifying risk and identifying alternative designs that might improve safety, also does not answer the question.

So how does a manufacturer make a final design decision? The manufacturer should first consider all applicable safety standards that affect the product’s design and whether competitors comply with or exceed those standards. The manufacturer should then engage in some type of risk assessment that identifies and quantifies risks in the contemplated design, as well as the various ways in which those risks could be reduced, such as by using a different design, guarding, warnings, instructions, training, etc.

At that point, the manufacturer must decide what design features to apply to their product, including any guarding, and when can they rely on these techniques to sufficiently reduce overall risk. This decision is most critical to the safety of the product in actual use, as well as a possible defense against potential claims that the product is unsafe.

Editor’s Note—Originally published in our March 2014 issue, this article remains one of the most popular articles among readers of In Compliance Magazine. The most recent version of this article was published in our January 2020 issue.

t’s been said that nobody grows up wanting to be an EMC engineer. Rather, it usually just happens. Maybe you had incriminating information on your resume, such as being a radio ham. “You’ve created interference, so you must know how to stop it, right?” Maybe you showed a knack for EMC troubleshooting, and suddenly you’re now the company expert – whether you want to be or not. Or maybe you just zigged when you should have zagged.

In any event, you’re now in the EMC trenches. In this article, we’ll discuss what to do next. It won’t happen overnight, but with a plan (and some work), you can move from EMC-novice to EMC-expert.

his is the eighth article in a series of articles devoted to the design, test, and EMC emissions evaluation of 1- and 2-layer PCBs that contain AC/DC and/or DC/DC converters and employ different ground techniques [1-7].

In this article, we evaluate the performance of the baseline AC/DC converter. The baseline AC/DC converter has only the components needed for functionality and does not have any specific EMC components populated. [7] This configuration will give us a view into what the conducted and radiated emissions issues will be prior to adding components and the cost to specifically address EMC issues. We present the test results from the baseline radiated and conducted emissions tests performed according to the CFR Title 47, Part 15, Subpart B, Class B.

n our last On Your Mark column, we explored key components of a comprehensive product safety strategy – from risk assessment to safety labels and manuals – and ways those elements work together to improve safety and reduce risk. How did we get here – why are certain perceptions and directives in place – and how do they differ across the globe? History is very telling in influencing the trajectories of product safety and liability. To get the details, we turned to insight from Doug Nix, Managing Director of Compliance inSight Consulting and lead author of the Machinery Safety 101 blog, with over 30 years of industrial safety experience specializing in machinery safety and risk assessment methods. Read our interview with Nix for context on how the past has shaped the ideology and approaches that we employ today.

Give us a brief historical overview of product safety and liability.