Meet Educator Donald L. Sweeney
President and Senior EMC Engineer, D.L.S. Electronic Systems, Inc.
Don has been teaching EMC and electronics for over 30 years, first at Oakton College, then at the University of Wisconsin, and currently as an independent EMC design seminar/workshop. He is a graduate of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana and has over 45 years experience in the EMC and electrical engineering fields. He is a senior EMC Engineer, an iNARTE certified EMC Engineer and President of D.L.S. Electronic Systems, Inc. Don specializes in EMC, RFI and EMI consulting and testing and is known worldwide for his problem solving abilities. He has served as a special consultant to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He is past chairman of the Chicago area IEEE EMC Society, founding chairman of U.S. Council of EMC Laboratories (USCEL) and has served on the board of directors of the IEEE EMC Society for more than 13 years.
ICM: What led to your commitment to becoming an educator in your field?
Don: As an engineer doing EMI/EMC testing for my employer, I was able to attend the IEEE EMC Symposiums. I felt a need to share what I was learning with other design engineers in my department, so I presented to them the information I had learned from the papers I had attended at the Symposium. When a fellow engineer would have a specific EMC problem, I would put together a few slides to show them how to design in a way that would avoid their problem.
I was pleasantly surprised when the University of Wisconsin asked me to present a night school class for engineers in the Milwaukie area. They had been contacted by a company who had heard about me and had suggested I teach a class there. I put together 10 weeks of lessons and we met every other Wednesday from 5:30 – 9:30 pm. We had 65 engineers and technicians attend the first semester, including 2 or 3 who drove up from the west side of the Chicago (about 100 miles each way), after they had all worked an 8 hour day. The average attendance was 62. It was such a pleasure to teach as everyone was so interested and wanted to learn about EMI/EMC. Shortly thereafter the university asked me to offer my class as a 3-day seminar.
A while later, I was asked to do an in-house series of classes for a large company that were held one Friday a month (payday so everyone was at work and in town) that lasted for two years. I eventually covered all the material I had, but since they wanted more, I kept generating new material.
I then began offering the classes locally in the Chicago area as a four-day seminar and students began attending from all over the world. The longer I taught, the more I had a growing need to help my students learn how to apply the EMC concepts to real life products, so in 2004 we began offering a hands-on workshop as part of the class to help tie together the concepts and practical applications.
The icing on the cake was added when we introduced the Product Reviews as an additional part of the class. The instructor(s), or one of their associates, discuss one-on-one with each student their own personal company project and how EMC can be improved. During the 45 minute review we are able to explain how EMC has been compromised using the terms and concepts we covered during the past three days. Even if the student does not have a product to discuss, we will talk about ideas they are considering and help in the planning stage. One student commented during his product review. “I would not understand what you are talking about had I not just taken your class. Now I see what we have been doing wrong.”
That sums up why I enjoy teaching others what I have learned over my more than 45 years in the electrical engineering and EMC design field. I personally believe by taking our current three-day seminar/workshop and taking advantage of the product review, a company has the potential of saving tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars by designing a product correctly from the beginning. For example, I once had a client at my test lab that would have saved $10,000 on the year’s production if they saved just “one penny” on each product they manufactured. Unfortunately very few “fixes” for a badly designed product can be added for a penny. Sometimes we can save a client (or potentially save a student) $10, $50 or even 100’s of dollars per product manufactured. Imagine what their savings would be over a year, or over several years of production, had they learned how to design their product with EMC in mind.
ICM: What do you hope attendees will leave your class having learned?
Don: When students leave this seminar/workshop, they should be ready to lead a design team with a high degree of confidence that their products will meet the EMC requirements.
The class is designed to teach concepts first, followed by the application of these concepts in a product. We begin by giving numerous examples of EMC problems that I’m familiar with, from the shutting down of nuclear power plants to a company designing a product using the wrong technology, requiring the power supply to be totally redesigned at a cost of about $500,000. We next discuss the various world regulations which must be met in order to market a product. Once students know why they need to understand EMC, they are next taught the very basics such as: Typical noise paths, Wave lengths, Grounding, Cabling and how shielding works, Passive components – how capacitors, inductors and even wires do not behave as ideal components.
We then discuss how electromagnetic fields radiate from wires and traces, and develop a strategy for designing our product to be a low emission system. We then go through each of the ways of minimizing emissions in our design, from the basic integrated circuit and how it influences emission, to the cabinet and how by using the correct material and the bonding of the joints, we create an RF tight system. We next cover filtering leads which might leave a system unshielded; then we troubleshoot a product which does not quite meet our EMC/ESD goal and see how to bring it into compliance.
During the last day we apply the concepts and equations by using a take-home software program developed by the instructors that will allow students to predict emissions based on quickly using a computer. Previously we’d been manually predicting emissions by using the equations developed in the textbook. We finally put this all together by meeting one-on-one with the student, applying the concepts just learned to their own product.
I strongly encourage all design engineers to take an EMC seminar/workshop so they can learn to evaluate their own products to avoid potential pitfalls.
Don shares teaching with Roger Swanberg. Here is a brief summary of Roger’s background:
Roger Swanberg is a Senior EMC Engineer at D.L.S. and teaches circuit board design. He is a graduate of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, with over 35 years in the electrical engineering field. He has worked for Motorola and Zenith in color TV design, Nuvatec Design Consulting as a consultant and EMC testing manager, US Robotics as an EMC designer and regulatory compliance manager, plus Motorola Lighting and Motorola Cellular as an EMC
and electronics designer. He is Vice-Chairman for the Chicago Section IEEE EMC Society.
Planned class schedule for 2012:
EMC By Your Design: A Practical Applications Seminar and Workshop
April 17-19, 2012 and October 23-25, 2012
Northbrook, IL
847-537-6400
www.dlsemc.com/1101
