Functional Safety and EMC Workshop

EMC and Safety have been two separate specialities for a long time. EMC specialists often consider the Equipment Under Test as a black box, moreover the Compatibility is assessed with respect to the functional behaviour. A confirmation of that can be found in the EMC Directive which does not address safety aspects. Commonly applied standards like the Generic Immunity standards even explicitly exclude safety considerations. On the other hand we see Functional Safety standards for electrical or electronic products like the IEC 61508 for which it has been a problem to apply a structured approach to quantify the relevant electromagnetic phenomena and their test levels. In the past years more attention has been given to this problem. Within IEC TC 77 working group 14 started to draft a ‘Methodology for the achievement of functional safety of electrical and electronic equipment with regard to electromagnetic phenomena’. Also within CENELEC a report about Functional Safety has been prepared. In the UK the IEE has drafted a Guidance Document on EMC and Functional Safety. It is the intention of this workshop to pay attention to the work that has been done so far. The different documents will be explained. Some practical examples will be given of a dependability analyses with regard to electromagnetic phenomena.