The CE Marking EMC Standards

Directive 2014/30/EU on electromagnetic compatibility is mandatory for those responsible for marketing a product covered by this directive.

In the case of internal manufacturing control, the manufacturer must carry out an ElectroMagnetic Compatibility (EMC) assessment, draw up the technical documentation, affix the CE mark, draw up the EU Declaration of Conformity, and implement a manufacturing process that ensures that each unit placed on the market complies with the technical documentation.

How do you design a product that complies with the essential CE marking requirements for EMC? A vast question.

This article focuses mainly on the simplest way of providing a presumption of conformity: the application of harmonized standards. There are several hundred such standards. How do you choose which ones will apply to a particular product? How can we anticipate upstream needs if the expertise comes into play as soon as the applicable standards are selected?

In an attempt to answer this question, we shall see that, fortunately, the majority of standards can be classified as product standards, generic standards or fundamental standards corresponding to a few "emblematic" EMC tests. A methodology must be applied to these tests, at both manufacturer (design) and laboratory level (most frequent EMC errors, installations, coupling modes, etc.).

The complexity of the subject is such that today it is hard to imagine betting on the conformity of a product if the conformity plan has not been drawn up upstream and followed through to the CE file.

Throughout this article, advice drawn from the experience of one laboratory is given in the form of a box. This advice is based on specific experience and is subject to interpretation in a particular context. Other contexts may lead to other recommendations.

A glossary and table of acronyms are provided at the end of the article. The standards cited are listed in the documentation section of the article.