System Level E3

Systems Level Perspectives for E3 and EMI Control

by Tim McDonald

Recently, I was invited to give a workshop talk in the IEEE EMC 2014. The entire session was interesting, and there were many good discussions afterward.

My presentation is below:

A key challenge for system level E3 (electromagnetic environmental effects) engineers is in translating the requirements that are levied at a higher level to lower level components. The E3 and EMC community along with system engineering efforts on major programs have developed very clear, well-researched, and widely accepted environment levels. Often, however, the threat is to items that are installed at the sub-system, box, or card level and may be afforded some protection from enclosures. A simplified analysis of poorly-defined shielding effectiveness values is simply not appropriate in a world of quantified, accurate analysis and simulation to drive engineering design.
In this talk, we will describe a systems level perspective for EMI control. First, we will describe the external environment level. We will summarize the sources, threats and requirements that are commonly encountered. We will describe known and standard data sources. We will summarize the state-of-the-art and emerging techniques for analyses that are appropriate for the environment level.