Troubleshooting

Solving EMI problems isn’t only about ensuring that a product can meet EMC regulations and standards (although it’s a significant part of the job). Another crucial reason for addressing EMI issues is to enhance product reliability, especially when a product operates in public or industrial areas where there are many different types of noise sources.

Many individual components in electrical and electronic systems and devices are integrated into systems that are required to function as a whole. Examples of such systems include large electric vehicles, fixed industrial installations, novel scientific products such as quantum computers, and more. There are two EMC-related aspects to consider: intra-system EMC and inter-system EMC. This article focuses on the intra-system EMC aspect while also considering the inter-system aspect.

In this column, the author offers a brief summary of a more systematic approach for using ferrite cores on cables. This summary can serve as a “ferrite core checklist” for design and test engineers.

This article looks at some of the reasons why the filters you may think will work often do not when they’re put into real circuits. So… let’s talk about why filters fail.

In this article, the author will identify two major types of single-conductor structure resonances and describe some case studies for both. He will then describe how design projects can quickly and easily be ‘de-risked’ from the possibilities of suffering either type of resonance by the use of low-cost field and circuit simulators and/or low-cost bench testing on physical ‘mock-ups’.

In this article, square unshielded wire loops are compared to shielded solutions including simple techniques to build them in your lab. Some examples are included to show that unshielded loops often work as well as shielded loops in some applications, especially for injecting signals into circuits.

There have been inherent problems with audio frequency conducted susceptibility tests since their inception. Some issues are resolved using a novel but inexpensive transducer.

Radiated emissions (RE) are often the number-one cause of compliance failures for most electronic products. This article describes simple troubleshooting steps and tools to isolate most RE issues.