Are you familiar with CISPR 32 and CISPR 35? CISPR 32 was originally published in 2012, followed by a pair of corrigenda and then the 2nd edition was published in 2015. CISPR 32 replaced CISPR 13 (Broadcast receivers emissions) and CISPR 22 (ITE emissions). In the EU CISPR 32 is published as EN 55032 and it has superseded EN 55013 and EN 55022. By now you should all be comfortable with CISPR 32 and your labs should be using it.
Likewise, CISPR 35 was published in 2016 and replaces CISPR 24 (ITE immunity). It ultimately will replace CISPR 20, as well. EN 55035 is applicable in the EU for the Radio Equipment Directive, but hasn’t been listed for the EMC Directive. This article will leave that discussion alone, but you should be aware of CISPR 35. Korea adopted its own version of CISPR 35 a while ago, but their standard is based on the Committee Draft for Vote (CDV) that resulted in a Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) that failed in voting in CISPR SC I. Confused yet?
It will only get worse. Recall the scene from the original Star Trek movie where Bones McCoy comes aboard the newly remodeled star ship Enterprise and goes off mumbling about having to look at the new sick bay. He knows it will be different, “I know engineers. They love to change things!” I’m sure whoever wrote that line had been around engineers, because it is true. We love to change things. That’s what we do.
Why do I bring this up? Because, guess what? Changes for CISPR 32 and CISPR 35 are afoot. Don’t worry, the changes won’t happen tomorrow, but they are scheduled to happen in late 2019 for CISPR 32 and 2020 for CISPR 35. This is, of course, if all goes according to schedule.
So, what’s changing?
CISPR 32
CISPR SC I MT7[1] is working on Amendment 1 to CISPR 32:2015. There are a bunch of items that they are looking at, and the items were divided up into 6 fragments. Five of these were circulated to the national committees last year as 5 Committee Draft (CD) documents. CDs are commented on by national committees, but they are not voted on. MT7 has reviewed the comments (most recently on February 28 / March 1 of this year in Milan) and is taking the next step on three of them. Fragments 1, 2 and 3 will be circulated as CDVs later this year in time to have voting finished prior to the next meeting of CISPR SC I in October. Fragment 4 deals with termination of the AC mains cables where they leave the measurement area and this is being dealt with by CISPR SC A. No further work will be done by MT7 on this until SC A amends the appropriate CISPR 16 standards and a CD was not circulated last year for this fragment. Fragment 5 deals with Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) and this work is not mature enough at
this time. Finally, fragment 6 deals with the RMS-Average detector and this work, as well, is not mature enough to go forward.
So, what do fragments 1, 2 and 3 impact? A bunch of items.
Fragment 1 deals with a large number of items. Too many to discuss in detail in a blog. A few are close coupling ports[2], allowable receive antenna positions when running tests, cable length between the EUT and AMN/AAN requirements, and AC mains cable routing. Wording was updated to try and reduce confusion. There is also a point dealing with HDMI cables, but this will be worked further and will not appear in the CDV later this year.
Fragment 2 deals with a few items, the most important of which is a change to Clause 11 of CISPR 32 to require full compliance with the measurement instrumentation uncertainty requirements in CISPR 16-4-2. Watch out for this one.
Fragment 3 primarily deals with suggested changes to the limits and methods of measurement for emissions above 1 GHz. No change in frequency range is being proposed, but the changes proposed will bring CISPR 32 into alignment with the FCC limits from 1 GHz to 3 GHz (some would call this a relaxation in CISPR 32) and the test methods in ANSI C63.4. In other words, height scans for all EUTs, not just those too tall to fit in the 3 dB beam width of the receive antenna. The voting on this CDV, and the comments that go with the negative votes, should be interesting.
In short, there will be 3 CDVs circulated to the national committees later this year after the French translation is prepared. These will deal with fragments 1, 2 and 3. The parts that pass will likely be circulated as a single FDIS in 2019. As the stability date for CISPR 32 is this year (the earliest any amendment could be published), passage of this FDIS will result in an amendment to CISPR 32. A new stability date will be agreed at the next CISPR SC I plenary meeting following publication of the amendment (late 2019 in Shanghai or late 2020 in San Francisco).
CISPR 35
The work on Amendment 1 to CISPR 35 Edition 1 is not as advanced as the work on amending CISPR 32. An RR document to officially start the work has not been issued, as this would start the clock running as to when the work must be complete. The meeting on February 26 and 27 in Milan was supposed to simply discuss whether or not a particular item should be included in the next amendment. The discussions instead went into details of these items. The original plan was to divide the work into items that were felt to be “easy” and those that would take more work. The “easy” items would be included in the next amendment and the others would follow at some time in the future. While a number of items are under discussion, there will be no documents forwarded to the national committees for comment prior to the next meeting of MT8[3] in Busan, South Korea next October. Suffice to say, if all goes as expected there should be an amendment to CISPR 35 published in 2020. More details as they become available.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Bones McCoy was correct in his observation in the first Star Trek movie. Engineers do love to change things and CISPR 32 and CISPR 35 are not static standards. Don’t
get comfortable with the standards as they exist today. Remember, CISPR 22 had 6 editions in its lifetime from 1985 to 2008. These standards won’t be any different.
Notes:
- Maintenance Team 7? Where did this come from? Working Group 2 was dissolved in the CISPR SC I meeting last October and replaced with MT7.
- Much more than can be discussed here, as it took an hour or more to discuss in Milan on February 28.
- MT8 replaced WG4 last October.
