Cost-effective Risk Management of EMC without special EMC design expertise or testing

Functional Safety and Risk Management standards for electronic equipment have been proliferating since the publication of IEC 61508 in 2000, and they all require electromagnetic (EM) disturbances and EM interference (EMI) to be taken fully into account. Previous guidance on how to manage risks caused by EMI assumed the use of considerably increased expertise in electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) engineering and its verification and validation, but this has been found to suffer from severe practical difficulties. To overcome these difficulties and for the first time make it practical and cost-effective to take EMI fully into account in risk management, an IET working group has this year published guidance that removes almost all EMC engineering requirements beyond those regarded as good practices in normal use. It achieves this by extending the use of “design hardening” techniques and measures for both hardware and software, which the existing communities of functional safety designers are already expert in applying, and independent functional safety risk assessors are already expert in validating.