Standards by Topic

Can thousands of regulations be harmonized?

Last summer, the European Union (EU) and the US took the first steps to establish a partnership between the two markets that together account for almost half the world’s economy. Teams of negotiators met in Washington to talk about how best to take the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) forward, and even though the second round of negotiations was canceled due to pressing political issues, both sides expressed a firm commitment to the TTIP process.

Intentional RF transmitting devices seem to be everywhere. Smart phones, tablets and similar devices provide the ability for users to be connected to the internet any time, from any location using nearly any device. Other than the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and the inner canyon of the Grand Canyon, it may be difficult to find any location without WiFi available.

Environmental compliance is a moving target -- each region can impose unique environmental requirements on products sold in their market and new regulations continue to emerge. Different global substance regulations create significant challenges for all actors in the electrical and electronics industry. Substances added twice a year to the EU REACH¹ SVHC Candidate List and the potential additional RoHS2 substances are prime examples of new or changing regulatory requirements.

While product safety and reliability are core principles of virtually every manufacturer designing equipment for the telecom industry, the Telcordia Generic Requirements (GRs) that ensure the integrity of such devices and systems are not commonly understood by manufacturers around the globe.

Industry standards play a major role in providing meaningful metrics and common procedures that allow various manufacturers, customers, and suppliers to communicate from facility to facility around the world. Standards are increasingly important in our global economy.

The first broadcasting station in Japan went on-air in 1925, a scant five years after the first radio station went live in the United States. A year later, Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK) was chartered by the Japanese government and is still the official public broadcast entity. The build-out of NHK’s network into the Pacific was extensive in the 1930s and during the early years of WWII and followed the expansion of Japan’s imperial armed forces across the Pacific.

When a manufacturer is thinking of the European Union (EU) as the next market for its electronic equipment, EMC compliance is one of the must-haves on the list of approvals. Unless a company has dedicated quality personnel to ensure testing and certification is done to the letter, the approval process can be quite complicated for engineers – from identifying the correct standards and models for testing to writing the declaration of conformity and preparing the product for testing. This article will explain what engineers need to do to demonstrate compliance.