regulations

Pressure to get product to market is stressful, as well as full of scenarios that most engineers and designers would like to forget about. Yet in the beehive of activity, the regulations that a product must comply with are critical to those design engineers, as well as other teams. So much, in fact, that a slight misstep early on or during the product life cycle can create devastating circumstances. Driven by market or other business issues some may succumb to the “limp factor” (LF): get it to work and ship at all costs for the first country or countries of use and worry about the others at a later time when the pressure is off. So, how can we prevent the LF from occurring?

Sellers and importers of Information Technology Equipment (ITE) must comply with a vast array of hardware regulations when marketing their products in today’s world. The scope of hardware regulations includes the following basic disciplines:

• Product Safety
• Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC)
• Homologation of wired and wireless telecommunication devices
• Environmental
• Chemical