I embrace change! Ask anyone Only a few weeks ago I changed my10+ years usual morning routine of tomatoes on toast with lashings of butter to overnight oats and I’ve not looked back. Not all changes are beneficial though and the subtle change in the calibration requirements for ESD guns to EN61000-4-2 could possibly have a detrimental affect on whether your ESD Gun meets the new standard.

The proposed edition 3 of EN61000-4-2 uses a different calibration reference plane to the previous edition. This new version specifies a height, includes the plane continuing to the RGP (Reference Ground Plane) at 0.5m and now includes the requirement for an RGP which wasn’t in the previous standard.

This won’t affect automotive or military ESD tests as yet, automotive ESD has its own standard and Military (DEF STAN in the UK) calls up a dated reference to the 2009 version of the standard so this wont change any time soon. For test laboratories that carry out Military (in the UK) and Commercial EMC, they will need to potentially calibrate their gun using two different calibration planes.

I understand that this change has been made to better define the RF parameters of the ESD pulse, after all, its bandwidth extends into the GHz range. But every single gun in use in the world today meets the specification with the existing calibration plane, why change it?

At best this is a total waste of metal producing 100’s or 1000’s of new calibration planes, at worst it will require manufacturers that have a close tolerance to the limits to possibly have to go out and purchase new guns! Do standards committees weigh up the environmental impacts of the decisions they make?

One key issue that cost manufacturers and test laboratories a fortune was the change in the way the surge parameters were measured between editions of EN61000-4-5. Total waste of time and it rendered a large proportion of the test generators in use obsolete or needing modification. The change was subtle and if an EUT failed the test with the surge parameters in the new version of the standard then I can say with probably 99% confidence that it would also fail to the older version too. So why make the change? It’s not environmentally sound and it adds significant costs to business.

Hmmm… maybe I don’t actually like change

I will be making a new calibration plane in the next few weeks for The Equipment Calibration Business Ltd. So hopefully we will soon have some data to compare the two planes and see if it will be an issue when the standard gets released.