EN 62368-1 — safety for audio/video and ICT equipment

For roughly thirty years, electronics manufacturers in scope of the Low Voltage Directive worked with two parallel safety standards: IEC/EN 60950-1 for "information technology equipment" (computers, printers, network gear) and EN 60065 for "audio, video and similar electronic apparatus" (TVs, amplifiers, set-top boxes). Both were prescriptive — long tables of clearances, voltages and material temperatures — and both struggled with converged products like a smart TV that is also a streaming computer, or a USB-powered audio interface that is also a sound card.

IEC 62368-1 collapses those two worlds into one, and rewrites the underlying philosophy. Rather than telling the designer "the creepage must be ≥ 2.5 mm," it asks the designer to identify the energy sources in the product, classify their potential to cause pain or injury, and then prove that safeguards between source and body part are appropriate. The result is the same product safety outcome, but reachable for technologies the original standards never contemplated.

What "hazard-based safety engineering" actually means

The standard's own scope, from IEC 62368-1:2018, describes it as:

"a product safety standard that classifies energy sources, prescribes safeguards against those energy sources, and provides guidance on the application of, and requirements for, those safeguards. The prescribed safeguards are intended to reduce the likelihood of pain, injury and, in the case of fire, property damage."

That sentence is the whole method in miniature. The designer's job, repeated for every form of energy in the product, is:

1. Identify the energy source — what kind of energy is present? (electricity, heat, mechanical motion, acoustic, radiant, chemical, fire).
2. Classify it — how harmful is the energy to a body part if the safeguard fails?
3. Place safeguards — barriers, distances, instructions, interlocks — between source and person.
4. Verify the safeguards — by construction inspection, measurement, or test.

The output of design work is then not "we meet table 2N" but "ES2 source separated from ordinary person by a basic safeguard plus a supplementary safeguard."

Energy source classes

Three categories of energy are explicitly classified into three severity tiers each.

The labels you will see in test reports and CB certificates are exactly these: an ES2 transformer secondary, an MS3 cooling fan blade, a PS3 lithium battery. (Some practitioners read the "PS" prefix as "power source" rather than purely thermal; the standard uses it for the fire-energy classification of circuits and components.)

A safeguard is then "basic," "supplementary," "double" or "reinforced" depending on how many independent layers stand between the source and the body part — borrowed conceptually from the insulation hierarchy of older standards but applied to every energy domain.

The three person categories

The same physical voltage can be safe in one product and not in another, depending on who is expected to touch it. IEC 62368-1 formalises this through three person categories used throughout the requirements:

• Ordinary person — a member of the public; the consumer; anyone who has not been trained. Default assumption for any externally accessible part of a consumer product.
• Instructed person — someone who has been informed by a skilled person about the energy sources and safeguards. Typical for office IT in a controlled workplace.
• Skilled person — has relevant training or experience to recognise the hazards and avoid the injuries. Field service technicians, factory test operators, electricians.

The same ES3 terminal that is forbidden to expose to an ordinary person may be acceptable inside a service cover labelled for a skilled person.

Scope, voltage limit, and the LVD connection

The standard applies, in its own words, to "electrical and electronic equipment within the field of audio, video, information and communication technology, and business and office machines with a rated voltage not exceeding 600 V." That 600 V ceiling sits comfortably inside the LVD's own scope, which covers electrical equipment "designed for use with a voltage rating of between 50 and 1 000 V for alternating current and between 75 and 1 500 V for direct current."

The hook into the regulation is Article 12 of Directive 2014/35/EU, which establishes presumption of conformity: equipment conforming to a harmonized standard whose reference has been published in the Official Journal "shall be presumed to be in conformity with the safety objectives" set out in Annex I of the directive. EN IEC 62368-1, in the version listed in the OJ, is the route most manufacturers of AV/ICT products take to that presumption.

The legacy standards (EN 60950-1 and EN 60065) were withdrawn from the OJ during the transition that closed in December 2020 in most EU member states; new declarations of conformity for products in this scope now cite EN IEC 62368-1.

What the 3rd edition (2018) added

IEC 62368-1:2018 (Edition 3.0) brought substantive technical changes versus Edition 2, including:

• Requirements for outdoor equipment (UV, ingress, ambient temperature ranges).
• Specific optical radiation classification (laser and LED light sources).
• Provisions for insulating liquids used in cooling or immersion.
• Work cell provisions for equipment with moving parts intended to be worked on.
• Requirements for wireless power transmitters — relevant for Qi pads, EV-adjacent gear.
• Fully insulated winding wire (FIW) as a safeguard in transformers.

These are the changes that most often catch teams porting a product from a 2nd-edition test report.

Common mistakes

• Citing IEC 62368-1 instead of EN IEC 62368-1 on a Declaration of Conformity. Only the EN version published in the Official Journal under the LVD gives presumption of conformity — the raw IEC text does not.
• Ignoring national deviations. Member states add A-deviations and special national conditions in the EN version; a product tested only against bare IEC text may fail in, e.g., Norway or the UK (where UKCA mirrors but is not identical).
• Wrong person category. Treating a service-only port as ordinary-person accessible — or worse, treating an exposed consumer port as instructed-person — both lead to incorrect safeguard placement.
• Forgetting batteries and external power supplies. A USB-C laptop in scope of EN 62368-1 is typically supplied with a charger that has its own EN IEC 62368-1 evaluation; the system DoC has to reflect both.
• Skipping the safeguard analysis in the technical file. Auditors increasingly expect to see an explicit energy-source / safeguard matrix in the technical file, not just a CB test report number.

Using Cenitia for this work

Cenitia helps prepare evidence-linked working drafts within its supported regulatory catalogue. Confirm the product scope, actual applied standards and completed assessments, and review the result before issuance. Source-change alerts prompt a review; they do not certify conformity, automatically reissue a signed declaration or guarantee monitoring of every national rule and standard edition.

Related from the Library

• Low Voltage Directive — your 2014/35/EU starting point — the umbrella CE marking process that brings EN 62368-1 into play.
• Technical file 101 — where the safeguard analysis lives.
• Declaration of Conformity 101 — how to cite the standard correctly.
• Risk assessment for CE compliance — the wider risk-management discipline that HBSE plugs into.
• Sample DoC walkthrough — see EN IEC 62368-1 cited in a real Declaration of Conformity.

Further reading

• IEC 62368-1:2018 publication page — official IEC catalogue entry for the 3rd edition base standard.
• Directive 2014/35/EU (Low Voltage Directive) on EUR-Lex — the directive that EN 62368-1 grants presumption of conformity to.
• CEN-CENELEC standards portal — for the published EN version including A-deviations and SNCs.
• European Commission — Low Voltage Directive (LVD) policy page — Commission guidance and lists of harmonized standards.
• IEC TC 108 — the IEC technical committee responsible for the 62368 series.