August 2011

Released in May of 2011, GR-1089-CORE Issue 6 Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) and Electrical Safety requirements for Network Telecommunications Equipment has undergone a number of technical changes. We look at its substantial modifications and the potential impact on previously certified products.

The reliability of electronic technologies (including the software and firmware that runs on them) can become critical when the consequences of errors, malfunctions, or other types of failure include significant financial loss, mission loss, or harm to people or property (i.e. functional safety).

The board stackup is probably the most essential piece for ensuring a successful PCB design. Modern high-speed busses require controlled-impedance traces, and whether you are using a simulation tool, a simple calculator, or the back of a napkin, you need to understand your manufacturing process to correlate your impedance calculations. This ensures that your trace widths and dielectric heights match what will actually be manufactured, and eliminates last-minute design changes.

An equivalent dipole model is proposed in this paper to represent the source of radiated electromagnetic emissions from an integrated circuit (IC). The height of an IC is usually much smaller than its length and width, so only three dipole moments are sufficient to characterize an IC in terms of its electromagnetic emissions. The dipole moments can be extracted from three TEM cell measurements. The radiated fields from the IC can then be calculated based on the extracted dipole sources. This IC emission model with three dipole moments is validated using the far-field measurements in a semi anechoic chamber for a test IC. For complex structures, it is desirable that the extracted dipole moments can be incorporated into a commercial full-wave tool as equivalent sources to simulate the radiations from an IC. This is demonstrated using an approach developed in this article.