LED dri­ver EMC

LED dri­ver is respon­si­ble for all EMC related prob­lems. Other parts– such as LEDs, cables, heat sinks, enclo­sure acts as anten­nas and ref­er­ence ground planes and can increase radi­ated emis­sions and con­ducted emis­sions.
If LED dri­ver is avail­able on mar­ket it should be tested to be cer­ti­fied and marked by FCC, CE or other marks. LED dri­vers usu­ally are tested using the same stan­dards as LED lumi­nar­ies or LED lamps:

  • EN 55015 Lim­its and meth­ods of mea­sure­ment of radio dis­tur­bance char­ac­ter­is­tics of elec­tri­cal light­ing and sim­i­lar equipment
  • EN 61000−3−2 Elec­tro­mag­netic com­pat­i­bil­ity (EMC) — Part 3 – 2: Lim­its — Lim­its for har­monic cur­rent emis­sions (equip­ment input cur­rent ≤16 A per phase)
  • EN 61547 Equip­ment for gen­eral light­ing pur­poses — EMC immu­nity require­ments (IEC 61547:2009)


Very often LED light­ing equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­ers buy tested and marked LED dri­vers, install them in their devices and send them to EMC test lab­o­ra­tory. After­wards, they get the offi­cial results from EMC test lab: “Device do not com­ply with emis­sion stan­dards”, man­u­fac­tur­ers can­not under­stand– why?
There exist three main rea­sons:

1. LED dri­ver man­u­fac­tur­ers are cheat­ing and have not tested dri­ver at all or have not tested cur­rent LED dri­ver ver­sion or have changed elec­tronic com­po­nents in LED dri­ver dur­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing process, after the test­ing and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

2. LED dri­ver is tested in EMC lab­o­ra­tory and passes all tests. Dri­ver is tested as sep­a­rate device– with­out LEDs as load, with­out enclo­sure and real wiring as in real LED lamp. LED dri­ver is usu­ally tested with 1,5m long AC power cable and few tens of cm long DC cable with resis­tive load or some­times with resis­tive load in par­al­lel with 10uF and 0,1uF capac­i­tors. This sit­u­a­tion is dif­fer­ent, than in real LED lamp, there­fore the test­ing results can be dif­fer­ent. Espe­cially, in case if LED dri­ver is tested and mea­sured emis­sions are very close to limit lines.

3. LED lumi­nary man­u­fac­turer are not fol­low­ing the instal­la­tion guide pro­vided by LED dri­ver man­u­fac­turer and dri­ver emits exces­sive amount of emis­sions. The usual points not taken into account are ground­ing of pri­mary– AC side of dri­ver, ground­ing of sec­ondary– DC side of ground­ing– heat sink of LEDs.


RF EMC DEVEL­OP­MENT has tested hun­dreds of LED dri­vers from var­i­ous man­u­fac­tur­ers from all over the world: Mean­Well, TDK-​lamda, ММП-​Ирбис etc. There are com­pa­nies whose LED dri­vers are ALWAYS com­ply­ing with EMC require­ments and there are no prob­lems in any con­fig­u­ra­tion. There are com­pa­nies that have their cheap, low qual­ity LED dri­vers that in no con­fig­u­ra­tion com­ply with EMC stan­dards, but they offer also high qual­ity LED dri­vers that are com­pli­ant. But we have also dis­cov­ered LED dri­ver man­u­fac­tur­ers that dis­trib­ute non-​compliant dri­vers with false test reports cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and mark­ing which exceeds the emis­sion limit lines so much that they are included in RAPEX list.

RF EMC DEVEL­OP­MENT rec­om­mends to check and ver­ify the doc­u­men­ta­tion and after­wards to order pre­com­pli­ance tests– espe­cially radi­ated emis­sions, con­ducted emis­sions and har­monic cur­rent emis­sions.


RF EMC DEVEL­OP­MENT offers EMC pre­com­pli­ance test­ing, accred­ited test­ing and devel­op­ment for LED dri­vers, LED lamps and other light­ing equip­ment. We can pro­vide eval­u­a­tion of LED dri­vers qual­ity, before they are installed in LED lumi­nar­ies and give recomen­da­tions.

EMC test­ing

RF EMC DEVEL­OP­MENT pro­vides accred­ited EMC test­ing to reach Euro­pean mar­ket. We hold a long list of Euro­pean stan­dards for such indus­tries as– house­hold, indus­trial, auto­mo­tive, med­ical, tele­com, rail­way and aero­space. Our test lab­o­ra­tory is accred­ited by Euro­pean noti­fied bod­ies accord­ing to ISO17025. Save your time by try­ing to cou­ple EMC test­ing with other tests and CE cer­ti­fi­ca­tion needs (safety, envi­ron­men­tal, energy effi­ciency, performance).


Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion

Through our part­ners, noti­fied bod­ies in Euro­pean Union, RF EMC DEVEL­OP­MENT pro­vides cer­ti­fi­ca­tion ser­vices for man­u­fac­tur­ers, retail­ers, dis­trib­u­tors and sup­pli­ers to enter EU mar­ket. We pro­vide all ser­vices to cer­tifi­cate your prod­ucts in short time span– EMC test­ing, LVD test­ing, devel­op­ment for such prod­ucts as: light­ing equip­ment, auto­mo­tive, con­sumer elec­tron­ics, indus­trial elec­tronic and machin­ery, med­ical equip­ment, telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and wood­work­ing equip­ment etc.

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