EMI Suppression Filters (EMC and Noise Suppression)Case: Ensuring compliance of LED bulbs with noise standards

Our business is contingent on making components for products that must comply with domestic and overseas standards. What solutions have been selected by leading manufacturers?

Issue

“There are some major issues in the company that must be confronted before we can respond to the needs of the marketplace.”

The bulbs and fluorescent lights manufactured by Company N have an established reputation in the industry for their long service life. However, the demand has been rising sharply for LED lighting for both business and household uses as a means of alleviating environment and energy conservation issues. Company N is not fighting this trend, and has been gradually increasing its production of bulbs for LED lighting over the last few years and meeting the needs of the marketplace.

Nevertheless, the company had only a handful of engineers with expertise in LED bulb production, so it had been nursing many misgivings over a full-blown mass production system, for example, and technical support for the eventuality of expanding into multi-model lineups.

There are some major issues in the company that must be confronted before we can respond to the needs of the marketplace.

“The chance of a big business deal has finally arrived! But there are many issues that we need to work out.”

A competitive project involving the making of LED bulbs for a mass-sales outlet under private brands was put forward while all of this was going on. Recognizing this as a chance to strengthen its future LED bulb production foundation, Company N decided to compete for the product.

Company N, which has always placed great stock on quality, has already taken steps ahead of other companies to meet the “noise terminal voltage” noise standards for its LED bulbs. However, when the company looked for features that would differentiate its products from inferior models that used low prices as a weapon to make the most of the ongoing boom, it found itself collecting more information, but in the end it was not able to find any strong points of appeal to users.

While it was still busy collecting information, the company suddenly received a request from the mass-sales outlet instructing it to meet international standards for “radiation noise.” In addition, it found that the production costs would not be allowed to increase by more than a few percent, even after measures to support the standards had been taken.

As manufacturers started to drop out, unable to clear the high hurdle of “radiation noise” while keeping down costs, Company N took up the challenge, but had little information on meeting the “radiation noise” standards, while issues regarding actual production continued to mount.

Main points of the issues:

  1. There were few engineers with LED bulb production expertise, and the future looked bleak.
  2. The company wanted to find aspects that would differentiate its products from those of its competitors, but was unable to find any convincing points.
  3. More and more standards related to LED lighting were being rapidly put into place and enforced both in Japan and overseas, and it was increasingly difficult to keep pace.
How can we solve this problem?