Expert Insights

Skipping pre-compliance testing can turn a routine certification into a costly redesign. This step-by-step checklist walks engineers through standards research, design reviews, documentation, and lab coordination, helping teams catch problems early and avoid the delays that derail product launches.

A simple antenna positioned right on your bench can reveal radiated emissions in real time. Learn how to separate product harmonics from ambient RF noise, track down capacitive and inductive coupling paths, and use copper tape and foil to hunt down leaky seams and apertures.

Supercapacitors are showing up everywhere from EVs to renewable energy systems — but one safety standard determines whether they're fit to ship. This guide breaks down what UL 810A actually requires, where manufacturers get tripped up, and one costly rating mismatch to watch for.

Why does a solid metal enclosure block an incoming wave almost completely, yet still let a sliver of energy through? This installment of EMC Concepts Explained walks through the reflection and transmission math at both shield interfaces, showing exactly why thickness and conductivity make all the difference.

Rule-based checks and tribal-knowledge methods can't keep up with chiplets, 3D stacking, and multi-domain ICs anymore. This roadmap from the ESD Association lays out where EDA tools, machine learning, and SPICE-based modeling are headed — and what verification will actually look like by 2030.

Compliance testing labs are where products prove they're ready for the real world — but what actually happens inside one? This primer walks through the key steps, tools, and methodologies engineers use to evaluate safety, performance, and regulatory adherence before products reach market.

Not all EMC emissions look alike — and knowing the difference can save your compliance test. Kenneth Wyatt breaks down how to use near-field probes to identify and interpret broadband versus narrowband emission profiles, so you can trace noise back to its source before it becomes a costly failure.

Choosing the wrong oscilloscope can compromise compliance results before testing even begins. This practical guide walks engineers through the critical selection factors — bandwidth, sampling rate, memory depth, and built-in analysis tools — and how to match each to real-world EMC, EMI, and high-speed digital testing demands.

Before you can calculate shielding effectiveness, you need to know whether your material qualifies as a good conductor — and that's where loss tangent comes in. This deep dive connects the math to the physics, from plane wave propagation to practical near- and far-field shielding formulas.

Grounding is the foundation of any ESD control program — but doing it right means more than just connecting a wrist strap. This primer covers the key requirements of ANSI/ESD S20.20, common grounding techniques, and what's coming in the next revision of S6.1.