test

How do you construct a building without metallic components of any kind? When you are engineers charged with overseeing the design and construction of an Open Area Test Site (OATS) for your company, you find out very quickly how to build a structurally sound facility while still keeping the area free of reflective materials.

With the inventions of the transistor in 1948 and the Integrated Circuit in 1958, and the utilization of these major breakthroughs in the development of computers and other electronic devices, industry began to worry about and to design components and end-products that could survive the discharge of electrostatic discharges to chips, printed circuit boards, and final packaged-products.

Designers and manufacturers of electronic products are frequently faced with the question: “How do I find a high-quality EMC testing laboratory where I can confidently test my products?” The emphasis of the great majority of design and/or manufacturing entities is on obtaining (1) quality preliminary testing of EMC characteristics to refine the design of their products and (2) quality final design testing of their product for regulatory approvals. The final design, of course, is what gets manufactured and released to the general population for their use in daily life. This article is intended to aid designers and manufacturers in finding and utilizing high-quality EMC testing laboratories.

"A rose by any other name would stink." – Kenneth Adamson

We have all seen advertising copy for test equipment manufacturers’ “EMC receivers” and “EMC test services” provided by commercial EMI test facilities. While we know what the aforementioned receiver does, and what sort of services the test facility supplies, the nomenclature is wrong and is symptomatic of a deeper problem.

This article describes the design and performance of a wide-band hybrid antenna suitable for use in reverberation chambers. The antenna is characterized over the frequency range 100 MHz to 25 GHz showing that it performs well above 200 MHz although its ultimate highest operating frequency has not been established.

An EMC test engineer’s primary responsibility includes creating test plans, procedures, analyzing test data, generating test reports, and mitigating noncompliance challenges. Many times the EMC engineer must assume the role of a software test engineer and create test programs necessary to meet the project objectives.