CE Compliance

[JohnsonMiller]

Hi,

Regarding the CE compliance requirements, I guess we should start from early stage of design, schematic and finally PCB. Can you recommend any document or tutorials, need to know what to do at each stage.

I know there are lots of books, but are not good since we do not have that much time to read it,

BR,

[mairomaster]

It's a big and complicated topic. If you have a smart design and you are a bit careful with the PCB layout, you normally don't have problems. There are many useful articles/presentations on the web that will quickly help you to understand the main points. Depending on your specific product, you might want to take a look at the following directives:

EN 55022:2010
EN 55024:2010+A1:2015
EN 61000-3-2:2014
EN 61000-3-3:2013

Do you plan to make any pre-compliance tests yourself?

[JohnsonMiller]

Dear Mairomaster,

Thank you for your comment, the design is just started and I am trying to setup CE-aware (or lets make it general EMC/EMI-aware) design from start,

Regarding your question, definitely yes, but I do not have idea what sort of test I should setup. Once I have been to that standard lab, very sophisticated place! I have no idea how we can setup such test conditions?

Next question, is CE just electrical compliance or it has non-electrical sections?

Appreciate your time in advance,

[mairomaster]

It has all sorts of sections. The one most relevant to the layout is the EMC. You just need to spent a few days reading on the web and it will be much more clear to you, as I said it is a very complex topic and I can't really summarise it in a post (nor have the time for that).

Even the pre-compliance EMC tests require quite a bit of expensive equipment (=> 1GHz spectrum analyzer for example and much more) and is not really worth it in my opinion unless your are doing something really dodgy with a high chance to fail the real tests. Apart from that, it is really hard to get good reliable results from the pre-compliance testing. If you have problems after you manufacturer the board and go for the real lab tests, then you might need to buy some equipment to troubleshoot.

[robertferanec]

The biggest problem with EMC documents is, that EMC is very complex topic and there is no one universal solution. So, as mairomaster explained, you may want to browse over internet for couple of days, read different articles and use the recommendations which may apply to your case. However, even you read the documents, that may not help as much as you are maybe expecting - don't be surprized when you find a lot of materials saying the exact opposite of what you just read (e.g. one document says that you definitely should split analogue and digital ground and the other will say, that you definitely should NOT split the grounds and only use the solid GND plane).

Usually, what I used to do was read some EMC recommendations and I tried to add support for that into schematic (e.g. some optional components what could be fitted or not fitted - depending on the EMC/ESD results). Now I just use what I know worked in the previous projects - and that depends on what kind of boards you are designing, where and how your boards are going to be used and how they are going to be fitted in the whole system. By reading EMC articles and documents you will get some feeling about the areas which could cause problems and then, use common sense and be careful when you will be working with the areas. After you measure your first boards, you will see what you should apply in future for similar designs.

Google for "emc pcb recommendations" or "emc pcb tips" to get some overview about the areas of possible problems. There is no one great or perfect source about EMC which I could really recommend ... it's more like finding your own pattern and creating your own "EMC knowledge world" by reading a lot of articles and doing a lot of EMC testing.