The WordPress.com prepared a 2013 annual report for my EMC blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Cables or other metal (antenna-like) structures often couple to sources of common-mode currents and end up radiating, causing product failures during compliance testing. During the troubleshooting process, it would be helpful to determine the resonance of these cables or structures to confirm they are the source of certain harmonic signals.
We could certainly measure the length of the cables or metal structures, but often, they are connected to other conductive assemblies, such as circuit boards or brackets. Because of these system inter-relationships, it’s not always easy to predict the resonances within a system, and so there’s always a little uncertainty as to where to start the troubleshooting process. These simple techniques may help quickly identify potential resonances within your system or product.
One of the most common questions I receive as an EMC consultant have to do with PC board design. And, no wonder. As clock and data frequencies increase towards 10 GHz, proper PC board design becomes an imperative for proper functioning of the system. The typical “rules of thumb” we used for low frequency boards no longer seem to apply.
So, when I ran across Lee Ritchey’s self-published book, Right The First Time – A Practical Handbook on High Speed PCB and System Design (Volume 1), I was intrigued. Both this book and the follow-on volume 2 (Advanced Topics) are available on his web site. Volume 1 is now out of print, but available separately as a 295 page PDF file for just $25. However, both volumes may be purchased for the special price of $95 (the price of volume 2, alone) – a deal I highly recommend. I’ll be reviewing volume 2 later. More…
Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) design, troubleshooting and training.
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