I didn’t say most labs are bad. Errors do happen and for me almost every lab I have used has made a mistake. These errors are rare but do happen and the effect of a single error can be very costly.
One lab made an especially bad mistake for a small company that engaged me that cost the company a lot of money, has since improved their game by instituting quality procedures they should have had anyway. The lab gave the company passing data but in fact the plot looked like the technician forgot to plug the antenna in, noise level of the instrumentation! Based on that, the company signed a contract for price and delivery for a million units of their product. The ultimate fix needed was a different core design of an inductor that cost them US $0.30. $300k is a lot of money for a small company. I can give many more examples. Usually the problem causes a product to fail when it actually should have passed. I have many examples that happened to me over the last 40 years in both private and commercial labs. The errors are still rare, but do happen. Over enough testing a person, like myself, will encounter an error with any given lab. Of the errors I have encountered, three were the result of the staff in the lab not being competent (over a span of 40 years), the rest were just simple mistakes, maybe another dozen or so. Again, this was over decades, so rare, but many millions of dollars were at stake in each case. In two cases, the lab personnel became a bit belligerent when I gently suggested they performed the test incorrectly. In both cases, the labs relented and retested after we examined the test standard and they realized they were testing incorrectly. A lab client needs to keep an eye out to make sure such an error does not happen to them. On the other hand, I have seen a lot of great labs. One, in Silicon Valley, I consider to be the best in the industry! But they did make one mistake on a test for me years ago, minimal impact at the time and it can't happen again. Doug Smith Sent from my iPhone IPhone: 408-858-4528 Office: 702-570-6108 Email: d...@dsmith.org Website: http://dsmith.org ________________________________ From: John Woodgate <j...@woodjohn.uk> Sent: Friday, August 11, 2023 07:02 To: EMC-PSTC@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG <EMC-PSTC@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG> Subject: Re: [PSES] thoughts on ESD test lab problems That's right. It is good to call attention to problems that may well be deeply hidden or not recognized as a possibility, but it is necessary to concentrate on the facts and leave out peripheral matters that don't help to deal with the issue. On 2023-08-11 14:28, Larry K. Stillings wrote: You could certainly word this in a different way that doesn’t generalize how “most” test labs are bad and/or incompetent. How about in the future you find a different way to word things. ________________________________ This message is from the IEEE Product Safety Engineering Society emc-pstc discussion list. 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