ast month, we introduced you to radiated emissions pre-compliance testing and what equipment is required. This month, we’ll show you how to actually make the measurement for commercial, industrial, and medical products, including all the system gains and losses. Once we complete the calculation for each dominant harmonic, you can directly compare it to the appropriate test limit. Next month, we’ll cover some details for automotive modules and military pre‑compliance testing.

The generalized test setup for pre‑compliance testing is shown in Figure 1. The unit under test (EUT) is placed on an 80 cm high non‑conductive table, which ideally should be able to rotate. However, a good estimate with fixed tables is to measure at least every face of the EUT in order to maximize the dominant harmonics. The preamplifier may not be required, as most modern analyzers have a 20-dB broadband preamp built in, if needed, to boost signal levels. The attenuator (usually 3 or 6 dB) is fixed to the antenna port to level out the impedance closer to 50Ω.

nder the heading of radiated susceptibility (RS) testing is the category of High Intensity Radiated Fields, or HIRF. What is HIRF and why does anyone need to test to these high levels?

NASA/TP-2001-210831, In-Flight Characterization of the Electromagnetic Environment Inside an Airliner[1], has this definition (emphasis mine):

ithin the IEEE, the EMC Society “punches above its weight class” in terms of standards development. We’re a small‑to-mid-sized society (< 4000 members) with a fairly large portfolio of standards (> 25). That’s not too surprising, since most readers of this magazine know that EMC engineers live and die by the requirements imposed by different standards documents.

In this article, I hope to do three things: 1) describe the standards development process within the IEEE EMC Society and encourage you to get involved; 2) provide updates on areas of active development; and 3) provide a list of currently available EMC standards.

This article is brought to you by:

ISPR is the International Special Committee on Radio Interference which was founded in 1934. The International Standard for electromagnetic emissions (disturbances) from industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) equipment is CISPR 11. The official title of the standard is “Industrial, Scientific, and Medical Equipment – Radio-Frequency (RF) Disturbance Characteristics – Limits and Methods of Measurement.”

The premiere edition of the standard was released in 1975, and the current edition (seventh edition) was released in 2024. The standard includes both limits and methods of measurement for conducted emissions and radiated phenomena. This article details the most recent Edition and retroactively traces the history and development of the content of the standard over the last 50 years.

ver the years, I have been involved in a number of situations involving product liability issues arising out of the purchase or sale of a business or product line. In my experience, either the buying company (“buyer”) or the selling company (“seller”) does not perform adequate due diligence when analyzing risks. They always use experienced merger and acquisition counsel who can advise on how to structure the deal and generally the kind of due diligence that should be performed. But they rarely retain a product liability and product safety lawyer to help evaluate certain pre-transaction and post-transaction risks and make recommendations on the specifics of the sales contract.

This article will discuss this subject from the perspective of the buying company, as well as the selling company.

his is the second of seven articles devoted to the topic of shielding to prevent electromagnetic wave radiation. The first article, [1], discussed the reflection and transmission of uniform plane waves at a normal boundary. This article discusses the normal incidence of a uniform plane wave on a solid conducting shield with no apertures.

Testing of single bare dies using the field-induced CDM (FICDM) setup according to JS002 [3] standard is not possible. One issue is the difficulty of touching bare die pads with the pogo‐pin, whose diameter can exceed the pad size. Moreover, FICDM testing at voltages below 20 V leads to unstable waveforms. The standardized testing setup does not reflect the real capacitance and peak current relationship due to the small dimensions and thickness of the dies, which affect CDM peak currents, rise times, and pulse widths. There are arguments for using alternative testing methods, such as CCTLP, to enable the testing of bare dies [4].