Related Resources

International Appliance Technical conference, March 28-30, 2005

Electronic Design Europe, 22 May 2008

IEC 60730-1 Standard

Today, as automatic electronic controls systems continue to expand into many diverse applications, the requirement of reliability and safety are becoming an ever increasing factor in system design. For example, the introduction of the IEC 60730 safety standard for household appliances requires manufactures to design automatic electronic controls that ensure safe and reliable operation of their products.

The IEC 60730 standard covers all aspects of product design but Annex H is of key importance for design of Microcontroller based control systems. This provides three software classifications for automatic electronic controls:

Class A: Control functions, which are not intended to be relied upon for the safety of the equipment.
Examples: Room thermostats, humidity controls, lighting controls, timers, and switches.

Class B: Control functions, which are intended to prevent unsafe operation of the controlled equipment.
Examples: Thermal cut-offs and door locks for laundry equipment.

Class C: Control functions, which are intended to prevent special hazards
Examples: Automatic burner controls and thermal cut-outs for closed.

Appliances such as washing machines, dishwashers, dryers, refrigerators, freezers, and Cookers / Stoves will tend to fall under the classification of Class B.

Renesas provides a specific Application Note and software building blocks to help customers in software design in order to achieve IEC compliance for the overall appliance. Renesas provides guidelines of how to use flexible sample software routines to assist and speed-up the development of class B software. They can be implemented in any system for self testing of Renesas MCUs in order to support the IEC 60730 requirements related to MCU tests. The software routines can be used after reset and also during the program execution. The end user has the flexibility of how to integrate these routines into their overall system design. The software building blocks on their own do not guarantee any specific IEC compliance. The IEC 60730 compliance concerns the overall appliance.

VDE-certified IEC 60730 Self-test Routines for R8C/2x Series of MCUs

IEC 60730 Self-test Sample Software for Tiny MCUs

IEC 60730 Self-test Sample Software for R8C/3x Series of MCUs