High Tech Design Safety CEO, Steve Barcik Amstel and his team have completed thousands of SEMI S2 evaluations and today he shares answers to one of the top questions he gets from his clients: what to expect from SEMI S2 and how you can make your process easier.
(Link to video also available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfEoU7aE5ho)
The fast track to getting your product to market is taking the time in the beginning to lay a solid foundation for success. It starts with training your team on the SEMI S2 standard requirements and providing them with the standard. The next big thing is to design the electrical parts of your equipment to the Electrical Standard…and we recommend IEC 60204 or IEC 61010 as well as NFPA 79 for Industrial Equipment Electrical Standard. And finally designing your equipment to meet SEMI S2 and determining the additional hazards that will need to be addressed, like heating, lazers, x-rays, radiation, toxic chemicals, pyrophoric chemicals…
High Tech Design Safety is a third party test laboratory that is available to help you throughout the above process and then with your evaluation needs. The next part of the process is to send data to complete a full scope from S2 and the other required standards for your evaluation. Things like how big is the equipment, how much power is coming in, the hazards involved..This will give an idea of how much time will be required to complete the conformity discovery process and evaluation. From here, you can expect a full scope of all that will be part of the evaluation and testing as well as what is required to give you a good result. Now a quote can be put together encompassing all the elements to complete the design package.
Then we can schedule an on-site visit for the evaluation and testing. Two critical things to prep for the on-site evaluation is to make sure that your equipment is fully functional, we prefer that any hazardous chemicals have been removed, and that all the interlocks, all the EMOs and all the safety functions are up, available and working. And the other thing is that you have a place for the evaluators to work, set up equipment and perform the testing.
What you can expect during the On-site Visit is an initial meet and greet for everyone to get to know one another and their roles as well as a walk through giving an overview of the piece of equipment…how it operates, what are we looking at, etc. Next we will verify all the documentation matches the piece of equipment. Then we will take a record of the equipment with a series of photos, completing on a constructional review, and from that we will produce a punch list (non-conformances and information required action items). Next we will perform any of the testing that is needed for your piece of equipment including earth grounds, input currents and voltages, temperature, noise emission, and other possible emissions like x-ray, radiation, laser… At the end of the first day their is a debrief with findings of non-conformances and we will offer suggestions based on best practices for correcting those.
Day two of the On-site is diving into any specific hazards…perhaps a toxic gas hazard and we need to do tracer gas testing…our tracer gas equipment and gases would have arrived on-site before us and we will run those tests. Same for additional hazard testing that we do from there. At the end of day two, we will have a complete understanding of your equipment and an understanding of where we are with constructional details.
After the on-site, we continue the evaluation working on any documentation details, labeling details, manuals, installation instructions, seismic calculations if needed. At this point, we have a nice package and coming to a close on the evaluation.
At the end you can expect a report detailing the findings, results and test data (reports from 200-400 pages), a certificate of conformity, and if your SEMI S2 project includes a CE marking, at that same time, we will provide a declaration of conformity
If you’re looking to better understand how your equipment conforms with SEMI S2, then please contact us today.
