Ken Wyatt

A Three-Step Process for Radiated Emission Troubleshooting Success

Most product designers know how to use a near field probe to assess harmonic content on their boards or system cabling. However, they often don’t know how to proceed next to resolve the actual issue. I developed a simple three-step process for evaluating a product and drilling down to the root cause.

PC Board Design for Low EMI

The root cause of many design issues involves the circuit board design and how the I/O and power connectors are arranged and filtered. Poor board designs, interconnect placement and filtering can result in radiated emissions, radiated immunity, and electrostatic discharge (ESD) compliance failures, among others. Bad designs often result in endless cycles of trial and error mitigation, compliance testing and board spins. This drags out the schedule and is very costly. I’ll explain how digital signals propagate in boards as electromagnetic fields. I’ll also explain how interconnect placement and poor filtering design and layout can affect the EMI performance. Once you understand this, then board stack-up, trace routing, filter design and interconnect placement should become very clear and you should be able to design a low-EMI board the first time!

Ten Tips for Characterizing & Troubleshooting Board-Level EMI for Products, Including Wireless 

It is fairly common to find multiple on-board sources of energy causing radiated emissions on today’s product designs, including board-level EMI for wireless portable, mobile, and IoT devices. The EMI from these energy sources can couple to cables creating radiated emissions, as well as interfere with the receiver performance of cellular, GPS and other wireless modules. This presentation describes methods for identifying, characterizing and reducing the coupling from these energy sources.

Bench Top Troubleshooting ESD and Radiated Immunity Failures 

Electrostatic discharge (ESD) has started to become very common, due to the lower noise margins for digital circuits. While the test is easy to set up in-house, it can become one of the most challenging EMC issues for manufacturers to overcome, because it’s difficult to determine the path of ESD current and exactly what circuitry is being affected. In addition, radiated immunity issues have become very common and is nearly impossible to set up in-house without great expense and trained test operators. Often it involves endless cycles back and forth between adding random fixes in-house and then running back to the compliance test lab. The delay for both ESD and radiated immunity issues can negatively affect product introductions. This presentation will describe a simple method for troubleshooting and mitigating both issues right on the lab bench. Several case studies will be described.

Biography:

He may be contacted at ken@emc-seminars.com  or kwyatt@interferencetechnology.com

Check out his web site for more technical information, training schedules, and links: http://www.emc-seminars.com.

Address:Colorado, United States