Troubleshooting

Ever wonder why equipment mysteriously fails in the field? This case study reveals how one manufacturer solved frustrating intermittent timer resets in an industrial kitchen—using clever EMI troubleshooting techniques with an EFT generator and near-field probe. Learn their practical fix that ended costly service calls.

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.

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.