FCC Submits Report on Robocalls to Congress

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has released its annual report to Congress detailing consumer complaints and enforcement action in connection with illegal robocalls.

The report offers insight into trends related to complaints regarding robocall over a nearly six-year period from January 2015 through November 2020. Informal consumer complaints increased dramatically during…

DILBERT © 2021 Scott Adams. Used By permission of ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. All rights reserved.

Jon Barth1937-2021

he engineering community lost a valuable asset this January with the passing of Jon Barth. His presence along with his contagious grand laughter will be very much missed at the ESDA symposiums and ESD work group meetings.

Jon was an inventor who always appreciated the challenge of an instrumentation problem. He started Barth Electronics in 1964 in his basement, with the design of a much needed high voltage, high speed attenuator for underground nuclear events at the Nevada Test site. After many successful years of designing and manufacturing high voltage instrumentation products for the national laboratories and the pulse power industry, Jon branched out into the ESD simulation and instrumentation industry. He leveraged his expertise with pulse power and manufactured the first commercial TLP machine for the ESD industry, which has been sold world-wide. His work has resulted in many patents in both the ESD and Pulse Power Industries. Authoring over a dozen ESD and Pulse Power Industry Papers, he was awarded the ESDA Industry Pioneer Award in 2006, and also the Nevada Exporter of the Year in 1991. He contributed as an active member in several ESDA Working Groups over the years, including Transmission Line Pulsing (TLP), Charge Device Model (CDM), System Level ESD, Transient Latch Up (TLU), and the Industry Council. He also served on the Technical Program Committee (TPC) for the ESDA mentoring authors. His willingness to bring to light technical deficiencies, and insight to address solutions, will be missed.

Design Considerations in Spread Spectrum Modulation for CISPR 25/CE Testing

Discussing Factors that Influence the Design of Spread Spectrum Modulation for CISPR 25 Measurement

By Christopher Semanson

CISPR 25, Conducted Emissions, and PWM Clock Sources

In automotive power electronics, there is one standard that has been either implemented or adopted as part of an OEM specification for interfacing and testing modules on a power bus, and that is a class of emissions limits defined in CISPR 25, “Vehicles, boats and internal combustion engines – Radio disturbance characteristics – Limits and methods of measurement for the protection of on-board receivers.”

The purpose of CISPR 25 is to set limits to provide protection for receivers installed in a vehicle from disturbances produced by components/modules in the same vehicle, including switching power supplies, one of the biggest culprits of conducted disturbance. The standard covers frequency-dependent emission limits (in dB) and methods for test, including spectrum analyzer settings and test setup. It applies to electronics equipment and devices intended for use in vehicles or trailers.

MIL-STD-464D: A Review of Recent Changes

A Long-Awaited Update to an Essential Standard for Military Procurement

By Ken Javor

How Grounds Affect the Peak Voltage Due to Lightning

Why the Most Common Characterization of a Ground Rod May Not Work for Lightning

By Albert R. Martin

n 1997, an experiment at the Camp Blanding center for lightning testing [1] challenged the predominant view that ground rods are essentially resistive. What that experiment found was that the waveshapes of lightning currents in a building grounding system and those entering the electrical circuits of the building were considerably different. That was at odds with IEC 61312-1:1995 [2] assertions that they should be the same. The conclusion was that, for lightning, the ground rod had an impedance with a reactive component in addition to the resistive one.

So how do we take into account the impedance effects for lightning? Well, it turns out not to be so simple. Professor Leonid Grcev, who with his students has conducted extensive studies of grounds, has found that a simple modeling of a ground rod as an R-L-C circuit doesn’t give correct results, due to surge propagation effects which cause a deviation from the low frequency behavior during the fast-transient period. So the challenge is to determine what this deviation is.

EM Waves, Voltage, and Current Waves

By Bogdan Adamczyk

his article presents a concept of a wave together with the wave equations and their solutions. The time-varying EM fields and their propagation in both the time and frequency domains is discussed first. Subsequently, the equations for the voltages and currents on the transmission line are obtained. It is shown that these equations and that their solutions represent voltage and current waves propagating along the line.

PRODUCT Showcase

Advances in CMOS Technologies Leading to Lower CDM Target Levels

By Mujahid Muhammad and Robert Gauthier for EOS/ESD Association, Inc.

Can you continue aiming for typical CDM protection levels?

Introduction

The ESD Design Window (ESD-DW) has been steadily shrinking over time due to technology scaling not only from a smaller feature size but also as the device’s architecture has changed over time. Higher speed interfaces are driving the need for lower capacitive loading and higher on-resistance ESD devices. As package sizes increase, peak CDM currents increase as well, putting additional pressure on making improved ESD devices in each new technology generation. As technologies scale, metal resistance at lower metal levels continues to increase, which contributes to increasing the clamping voltages within ESD devices.

The above factors contribute to significant challenges in meeting the generally accepted CDM targets of 250V or 500V. Meeting functional performance and CDM existing targets can be nearly impossible for some types of I/O interfaces depending upon the type of circuit topology used in each design. In this article, we will describe the ESD-DW and the reasons for its continued shrinking. These effects mentioned are summarized in Figure 1 are driving the need for lower CDM targets.

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