The Commission says its Auction 114 would launch in early 2027, making available 132 construction permits for currently vacant FM radio channels, including 100 permits not previously offered. This will also be the first FCC media auction utilizing the Commission’s Auction Application System…

f you can prove with a conformity assessment that your product complies with the European (EN) harmonized standards, the “presumption of conformity” applies to your product in the European Union (EU). This means your product is in line with the corresponding EU rules, directives, and regulations. What this means in detail, and where the difficulties lie today (e.g., the James Elliott case,² the Malamud ruling,⁴ the ongoing ISO/IEC litigation,⁵ and the shift towards Common Specifications⁶) are explained in this article.

The world of technical standards can be confusing. This article should help you to understand the concept of harmonized EN standards, and especially why no new harmonized EN EMC standard has been cited in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) under the EMC Directive 2014/30/EU since June 2022, and why the situation has, if anything, become more complicated in 2024–2026.

lobal power cord compliance has evolved into one of the most critical and surprisingly complex elements of safety engineering for internationally marketed electronic and medical devices. This article provides a practical, engineering-focused interpretation of global power cordset certification requirements across key markets, drawing on a manufacturer’s internal compliance framework and cross-referencing official government regulatory sources. Engineers will learn how to navigate country‑specific testing, certification marks, documentation, and cordset design constraints to ensure safe, legal, and uninterrupted product deployment worldwide.

Electrical safety compliance often begins at the mains interface—the power cord. Although frequently perceived as a commodity component, the power cordset is one of the most regulated subsystems in an electronic or electromechanical product. For medical, laboratory, industrial, and consumer equipment, power cords are scrutinized by regulators because they represent a direct human-exposed connection to national infrastructure power.

ecently, we were asked to supply a “dissipative” flooring system for an application where many experienced ESD practitioners would normally advocate for a much stronger electrical coupling to ground.

The discussion quickly narrowed to resistance numbers. The end user repeatedly emphasized that the floor simply needed to measure somewhere between 1 × 10⁶ and 1 × 10⁹ ohms. As long as the material fits within the ANSI/ESD STM 7.1 dissipative resistance category, they believed the requirement had been satisfied.

anufacturers of products and providers of services can be held liable for injury, damage, or economic loss suffered by a customer or a third party based on all aspects of their products and services. This includes the product or service itself, all written materials that accompany the product, including warnings and instructions, and all oral and written statements made before and after sale. As a result, manufacturers and service providers must provide a reasonably safe product, competent services, and all forms of product information that do not diminish the quality or safety of the product or service or encourage customers to take actions that result in injury, damage, or loss.

his article discusses the impact of a solid conducting shield on the electric and magnetic fields when a normally incident uniform plane wave penetrates it. The shield is made of a good conductor with no aperture and a thickness much greater than the skin depth at the frequency of interest. A good conductor is defined as a medium in which the conduction current density is much greater than the displacement current density, or equivalently, the loss tangent of a medium (σ ⁄ ω >> 1). [1] Plane wave shielding is achieved with enclosures that are located far enough from the source to be in the far field where the ratio of the electric and magnetic field amplitudes approximately equals to the intrinsic impedance of free space (η₀ ≅ 377Ω). Examples of this type of shielding may include fixed or mobile installations of electronics protected from airborne or terrestrial sources. A specific example of this shielding approach is when lighting electronics kept at the top of a stadium light pole are enclosed in a shielded box. This shielding box is located far from a source, such as Wi-Fi used in the stadium, and is therefore considered to be in the far field.

s semiconductor technologies advance toward smaller CMOS nodes, heterogeneous integration, and ultra-high-speed I/O interfaces, the design of electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection has become significantly more challenging. Traditional rule-based and empirical methods are no longer adequate for ensuring robustness across increasingly complex, multi‑domain, and multi-technology systems.

To address these challenges, the ESD Association Technology Roadmap [1] outlines a forward‑looking strategy built on three major pillars…