"what is compliance testing and how does it affect my product?”  this is a question we hear from our clients every day.  the answer in one word….depends.  am i purposely trying to confuse the matter?  no, the various countries and agencies around the world do a much better job at that than i could ever do!

 when one attempts to define compliance testing, the paramount question to answer is, “what am i trying to comply to?”  is it an internal design goal, a domestic regulatory requirement or the unknown importation laws of a country only a marketing executive has heard of?  of course, those requirements are not mutually exclusive and more often than not our clients are trying to comply with combinations of more than one requirement.  as you will see, they are very much related and the process to comply with all of them requires a concerted effort which begins shortly after the product idea has been conceived.

 when the product development team has formulated their design ideas, the compliance game has begun.  from this new product initiation come a myriad of technical design and verification requirements the developmental team often doesn’t have the experience or time to focus on.  be they thermal, mechanical, electrical, software, reliability, design verification or regulatory concerns, any one can lead to major issues of increased cost and longer time to market.  very few companies have the expertise or bandwidth to address these areas and are coming to degreec to outsource some or all items.

 we can engage a client on a product at any time in their new product development cycle.  often we are brought in to educate our clients to the design and test requirements of the markets they are targeting.  our seminars and training classes address the issues the design team will need to consider prior to beginning the product development.  when our clients get us involved at the early design phase, our engineers have provided them with thermal analysis and design guidance using computational fluid dynamics tools (flowtherm, ideas, etc.) and experimental prototyping to correlate the models with empirical data.  we combine that thermal service with our mechanical engineers who provide 3d modeling (solidworks, pro/e, etc.) of some or the entire product for a complete thermal/mechanical packaging solution.  in conjunction with those design efforts our engineers are performing the electrical and software development work as part of our clients engineering team to complete the product design.  this design is also under the design scrutiny of our compliance engineers (emi/emc and product safety) to ensure a smooth path to worldwide certification.

 when the product has completed the initial design phase and components have been selected, our engineers support the reliability and design verification testing requirements.  these efforts include our performing mean time between failure (mtbf) and return rate analyses, margin testing of power supply voltage and frequency over temperature extremes and highly accelerated life testing (halt) which includes the identification and mitigation of the weak points of a system.  this data is analyzed to determine whether the product is robust enough to consider the design final and send it into production.

 once the product design has been finalized and a production like product has been manufactured, our compliance test engineers perform the necessary regulatory test suite for your markets of interest (emi, emc, product safety) at our independent and accredited (a2la, verizon itl) division, iqs.  we also provide our clients the ability to sell into world-wide markets with our in-country certification program (in conjunction with a partner organization).  our engineers will provide a program to support the continued reliability of the product utilizing highly accelerated stress screening (hass) and highly accelerated stress auditing (hasa) profiles which can ensure that your end customers are receiving a robust product.  even later in the product lifecycle when change order management becomes prevalent, our engineers are involved in the review of these revisions and the ramifications therein.

 the degreec team of industry experts provides a total solution to our customers design and test needs.  we work within our client’s engineering system to ensure seamless integration of tools and personnel.  the end result of these efforts is a shorter development cycle allowing for a reliable product which is less expensive to produce and maintain while still having a quicker time to market.