Anablog

The October Conformity magazine has five good articles. Conformity is about getting safety (UL) and FCC and CE approval for your products. If you have ever had responsibly to bring a product all the way from concept to production like I have, you appreciate any resources that can make the last minute things like the approvals go better. You have to be done with the design before you can measure for approvals so this is always a high-stress part of the project. A disaster here is sure to be seen by everyone, including the people that can get you fired. If you are a cubicle rat that just has to scrawl a schematic and somebody else runs SPICE on it and somebody else prototypes it and some other department does the approvals and some other department after that does the manufacturing engineering, well, crawl back into your cave and don’t worry about Conformity. But you should also be prepared to lose your job in a few years. Companies need engineers to know about all phases of a design effort—and being aware of the downstream headaches can mean the difference between your design sailing though or whether it plops right back into your lap for a re-spin.

Conformity article number one is a nice write-up about spectrum analyzers by Dennis Handlon, a smart Agilent guy. You gotta love Conformity because they publish the article by an Agilent guy and put a picture of a bunch of Rhode and Schwartz equipment on the first page. Yuk yuk, I notice Agilent must have made “the call”—on the web (pdf) version the picture is full of Agilent equipment. Maybe they put a horse’s head in the editor’s bed.

Next up is an article about Red China’s CCC compliance program. The hunger of a recently liberalized society for consumer goods knows no bounds and there will plenty of opportunity to sell into this market. As our dollar plunges to new lows you might see things made in the USA and sold in China. How refreshing. This article will fill you in on the Chinese regulations you will have to meet to sell products there.

Despite what all the electric car fanboyz say, deploying lithium ion batteries in cars will be a tough safety challenge. You can get a feel for this by reading a good article about using lithium ion batteries in telecom facilities. The telco folks have developed a standard- GR-3150-CORE to specify generic standards for li-ion in facilities. My mentor Big John Massa has been inside a 48-volt battery bank in Texas that was hit by lightning the week before. It was an underground concrete bunker and John told me it looked like a bomb went off inside it. As the article points out, lithium is very reactive and we need to take the safety concerns seriously.

Going beyond the perfect article trifecta, there are two more cool articles about safety and compliance. One is about surge suppression and UL 1449. This talks about protecting your equipment from power line surges. Anyone who has been to Florida and seen the lightning-induced surges on the AC line will appreciate this. This is also good to know for products designed for foreign markets. Doug Bailey from Power Integrations told me how in India, when the power goes out, everybody switches to generators. Then when power is rested there is no load on the grid and there is a huge surge that will kill a lot of poorly designed equipment. I talked about this in my article about global design a year ago.

The fifth and final and really cool article in the October 2007 Conformity Magazine is about ESD testing. It was written my Robert Ashton from On Semi. This is a constant concern for both semiconductor makers and anyone that has to watch some guy light sparks all over your front panel to make sure that none of the electronics get fried inside. The trick I learned when consulting at HP was to put a bare copper ground ring all around the edge of the board. You will have to fight the board house and others since nobody thinks exposed copper is good. The ring usually takes the ESD sparks from the front panel (assuming the board is mounted edgewise to the panel). You still will be amazed to see where those sparks go and the damage they can do to your circuit.