Standard · Standards & Organisations
ISO/IEC 17025 (General Requirements for the Competence of Testing and Calibration Laboratories)
The international standard for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories. Accreditation to it gives customers and regulators confidence in a laboratory's reliability, safety and compliance test reports.
- Also known as
- ISO 17025
- Type
- Standard
- Domain
- Standards & Organisations, Compliance & regulation
Overview
ISO/IEC 17025 is the international standard that sets the general requirements for the competence, impartiality and consistent operation of testing and calibration laboratories. Accreditation bodies assess laboratories against it, and an accredited laboratory's results are accepted by customers and regulators with less need for repeat testing. In the semiconductor industry it applies to the reliability, failure analysis, EMC, chemical analysis and calibration laboratories whose reports support qualification, compliance and customer claims.
How it works
The standard is published jointly by ISO and IEC and prepared by the ISO committee on conformity assessment (CASCO). The current edition, the third, was published in November 2017. Its requirements cover how the laboratory is organised so that commercial or other pressure cannot bias results, the competence of its staff, the suitability of its equipment and environment, the validation of its methods, metrological traceability of its measurements, the estimation of measurement uncertainty, the handling of samples and the content of its reports.
A laboratory does not certify itself. It applies to an accreditation body, such as NIST's NVLAP programme in the United States or a national body elsewhere, which assesses the laboratory against ISO/IEC 17025 for a defined scope: specific tests or calibrations, methods and ranges. Accreditation is not permanent and is reassessed periodically. Through the ILAC Mutual Recognition Arrangement, signatory accreditation bodies agree to accept each other's accredited results, so a report from an accredited laboratory in one country is recognised in others.
Accreditation covers only the listed scope. A laboratory accredited for temperature cycling is not automatically accredited for ESD testing, so buyers check the scope document, not just the certificate.
Examples
- A third-party reliability laboratory accredited for HTOL, temperature cycling and HAST, used for automotive qualification of a new chip.
- An EMC test house whose accredited scope covers the emissions and immunity methods a customer has specified.
- A calibration laboratory providing traceable calibration of the oscilloscopes and source measure units used in a validation lab.
- A chemical analysis laboratory accredited to measure restricted substances for a materials declaration.
Why it matters
Laboratory quality managers, reliability and failure analysis lab engineers, calibration engineers and test laboratory managers work to ISO/IEC 17025 every day. Chip companies rely on accredited laboratories, their own or external, when results must stand up to customers, auditors and regulators, for example in automotive qualification, EMC compliance or substance analysis, and calibrated instruments underpin every measurement on the production floor.
Related terms
Part of the Standards & Organisations glossary, with every term in the topic and the lifecycles, tools and standards that use them.
Where it appears on the Hub
Used on 8 pages of the Hub. In each group, the pages that mention it most come first.
Suggest an improvement
Suggest an improvement to this entry
A clearer definition, an example, a correction or a source an editor can check. Editors review every suggestion before the entry changes.
Last reviewed . Written by The Semiconductor Hub editorial team. The full glossary