Major Standards Organizations

Immunity from voltage sags is vital for reliable operation of our ever more sophisticated electronic controls and equipment. Every electrical product should be able to ride through typical voltage sags, but in many cases the first sag test occurs after equipment is installed and in operation. Select the appropriate sag immunity specification and equipment compliance testing, and you’ll be glad you did.

Today’s end-use electronic equipment has a number of characteristics that require protection from the electromagnetic environment. These characteristics include the growing use of digital electronics (still with a layer of analog electronics); multiple inputs and outputs for power, data, controls and indicators; ventilation for air flow and thermal management; and small openings for accessories. Few pieces of equipment use only one microprocessor. Multiple digital packages (i.e., integrated circuits) are used for small and large amounts of memory, signal processing, and input/output control just to name a few. The days of having just one power cord and a few knobs for control have long since past.

In this second installment of a two part article, we continue our review of the recent meeting of IEC-CISPR held in October 2010 in Seattle. In the first part of this article, we have described the current changes affecting the basic standard CISPR 16 and the activities of its experts within CISPR sub-committee (SC) A. We now take a look at the activities of the other CISPR sub-committees responsible for preparing the CISPR product standards. We also describe some of the projects shared by CISPR and IEC TC 77B (High Frequency Phenomena).

CISPR 11 is the International Standard for electromagnetic emissions (disturbances) from Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) Equipment. The official title of the standard is “Industrial, Scientific, and Medical Equipment – Radio-Frequency Disturbance Characteristics – Limits and Methods of Measurement.” The premiere edition of the standard was released in 1975 and the latest edition (Edition 5.0) was released in 2009. The standard includes both limits and methods of measurement for conducted phenomena and radiated phenomena. This article traces the history and development of the content of the standard over the last 35 years.

The history of the International Special Committee on Radio Interference (CISPR) is one that extends over 75 years. There have been papers written over the years on its history. The one that is used as the basis for this article was presented at the 2005 Zurich EMC Symposium. The title was “A History of the Evolution of EMC Regulatory Bodies and Standards”, written by the authors of this article [1]. Manfred provided the majority of the research on CISPR up to the time of the Zurich symposium and Don continued the history up to the present time. This article will then present a brief history of CISPR from its inception to the present time.

The photovoltaic (PV) industry has experienced incredibly fast transformation after year 2000 as a result of extraordinary technology breakthroughs, from the material level up to large-scale module manufacturing.

With the PV industry expected to grow consistently in the coming years, two main questions are capturing the attention among market operators:

1. What constitutes a “good quality” module?
2. How “reliable” will it be in the field?