EMC Engineering Basics

EMC Engineering is confusing for many, since it isn’t taught in most engineering programs. It’s a common cause of late program failures when a piece of hardware fails regulatory testing, so most people encounter it for the first time in the context of getting bad news: “Your product failed EMC testing–go fix it!” This course should be a friendlier introduction to the topic that will give you a starting point for understanding EMC issues, particularly when it comes to radiated emissions and radiated immunity (the most commonly failed EMC tests ).

While EMC overall is a complex topic, there are a few things that cause most of the problems. This course will feature an introduction to EMC–why do we care? We’ll talk about how different things can start acting like antennas even though they weren’t designed that way. That includes cables, printed circuit boards, and metal enclosures/housings. We’ll talk about the most common source of electromagnetic noise. That is the noise associated with switching operations, whether from a PCB clock or a power supply. At the end there will be a benchtop hardware demonstration that illustrates these how these principles work in the real world. At the end of the course you’ll be able to evaluate your designs for the most common risk factors that might lead to EMC test failures.