Updates from the TCB Council Workshop of April 14 – 16

SPEAG Ensuring Compliance of Products with Latest Regulatory Procedures

The TCB Council Workshop was held in Baltimore, Maryland, a twice-yearly event for test labs and regulatory agencies to exchange information about the latest developments on regulatory compliance evaluation.

The radiofrequency exposure updates from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) and The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) included the following information:

ISED (Canada):

• ISED announced that their Notice on specific absorption rate (SAR) compliance testing of devices with camera protrusions (Notice 2025-DRS0008) will be published as early as this week, after review of the comments on the draft Notice.
• ISED will soon release updates of RSS-102.SAR.MEAS (adding motion sensor procedures for SAR assessment) and RSS-102.IPD.MEAS (adding time-averaged incident power density (IPD) procedures). Simulation results are now accepted per RSS-102 SAR.SIM, NS.SIM and IPD.SIM.

Slide presented by Dr. Alfonso Tarditi with summary of IPD evaluation proposal, presented at TCB Council Workshop.

FCC (USA):

• FCC presented a refined procedure of “SAR Testing of Irregular Shaped Devices” which will be incorporated into Knowledge DataBase (KDB) 865664 D01.
• The FCC proposes deviating from the internationally agreed 2 mm evaluation plane for IPD compliance by instead requiring assessment at 0 mm for next-to-ear and extremity exposure conditions. For body exposure and front-of-face exposure conditions, this distance is 5 mm or less, and 25 mm or less, respectively. No date was given on the publication of the new KDB document.
• The FCC has proposed a step-by-step process for qualifying probe array systems for use in the compliance assessment process, whereby the first step is to collect probe array system measurements from SAR test reports submitted by test laboratories who apply the maximum error against the SAR limit. FCC also stated that probe array system data will not be accepted until this procedure has been formalized in a KDB publication. Comments are welcomed in the coming months.

SPEAG, together with our partner IT’IS Foundation, is fully committed to investing in the necessary science, generating comprehensive data, and delivering enhanced solutions that will enable robust testing against these new requirements while preserving high precision and good inter‑laboratory repeatability.

For further information, please contact us at info@speag.swiss or any of our sales channels.

Kind regards,

Your SPEAG Team