Seminar: Navigating EMI and EMC: Key Issues, Diagnostic Approaches, and Mitigation Strategies

Abstract

EMC basics and common radiated emissions design issues

Radiated emissions is usually the number one challenge for most product designers. To help your understanding, we’ll go over some basic EMC theory as to why products radiate and “design for compliance” techniques to help reduce radiated emissions.

Break (30 min)

Bench top troubleshooting the top 3 EMC issues

Many of the more challenging EMC issues tend to cycle endlessly between in-house trying of “fixes” and then failing again at the 3rd-party compliance test lab. This wastes time and money. Learn easy ways to analyze and mitigate the top three EMC issues and lower the risk of test failures during compliance testing. We’ll discuss how to evaluate radiated emissions quickly, how to simulate radiated immunity failures and trace the path of ESD current, so intelligent mitigations can be applied – all on your own workbench!

Lunch break (60 min)

PC board design for low EMI

As a consultant for over 10 years, I’ve realized the root cause of many design issues revolves around the circuit board design and how the I/O and power connectors are arranged and filtered. Poor board designs and poor interconnect placement and filtering can result in radiated emissions, radiated immunity, and electrostatic discharge (ESD) compliance failures, among others. Bad designs often result in endless cycles of trial and error mitigation, compliance testing and board spins. This drags out the schedule and is very costly. I’ll explain how digital signals propagate in boards as electromagnetic fields. I’ll also explain how interconnect placement and poor filtering design and layout can affect the EMI performance. Once you understand this, then board stack-up, trace routing, filter design and interconnect placement should become very clear and you should be able to design a low-EMI board the first time!

Break (30 min)

Characterizing and troubleshooting wireless and IoT self-generated EMI

It is fairly common to find multiple on-board sources of energy causing EMI on today’s portable, mobile, and IoT devices. The EMI from these energy sources can couple and often interferes with the receiver performance of cellular, GPS and other wireless modules. This presentation describes methods for identifying, characterizing and reducing the coupling from these energy sources. Much of the content describes how to “quiet” DC-DC converters, which is important for many other products.

The class should end at 3:30 PM PT.