EMC and Its Role In Reliabilityby Ken Javor, EMC ComplianceTotally anecdotal, but this just happened to me.My wife uses a powered wheelchair. A very high end, high quality chair. We were on vacation driving north and had just crossed the 45th parallel in the state of Michigan. The 45th parallel anywhere is halfway between the equator and the North Pole. In Michigan it’s also … [Read more...]
Avoid the Most Common Failures with These 7 Essential EMC Design Rules
A reader recently asked me what the top design rules were that they could implement on their product to maximize the chances of passing FCC and CE testing. There’s no doubt that there are countless ways to fail emissions and immunity tests, but a pattern of failure modes did emerge at my EMC lab.Regardless of the type of product I was testing, be it medical, industrial, … [Read more...]
Common Mode Emission. Can It Get Any Worse?
You betcha! Once upon a time I was in charge of EMC design for a large scale military digital telecommunications system. This system had to handle both red and black analog and digital data with the proviso that never the twain shall meet. In the lab where all the engineering tests were taking place everything went great until the cables were hung on the … [Read more...]
CM Feeling Bad, Check its Pulse
The last post examined CM radiation. Wow, what a problem! Over 100,000 microvolts/meter from a 3.5 ma signal. If the DM is normally the intended signal, where does the big common mode signal come from? Let’s take a look at that. The whole world seems to be enamored with high speeds. I know I could hardly wait to get a 1 GHz notebook. Did it help me … [Read more...]
