Keynote to address EMC and automotive ICs

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Feb 8, 2006

Etienne Sicard will be the keynote speaker at the Automotive EMC 2006 Conference.

Etienne Sicard will be this years' keynote speaker at the Automotive EMC 2006 Conference on 17th May at NEC Birmingham, UK.

The keynote presentation "EMC guidelines for integrated automotive circuits" will examine the impact that the IC has on the EMC of both circuits and ultimately the vehicle environment.

The 2006 conference organiser, Martin O'Hara, comments: "The phenomenon of EMC both starts and stops at the IC level".

"We often concentrate on transmission mechanisms and test techniques in the EMC world, but it should be valuable to all involved in EMC to have an understanding of where the emissions originate from and ultimately where interference will cause problems, that is within the integrated circuits".

"It is the switching noise of processors that generate significant amounts of the noise content in the vehicle powernet, this is only getting more problematic with ever increasing electronic content in-vehicle".

"Equally the high immunity requirements of the vehicle environment, ranging from 30 to 600V/m in some vehicle standards, conflicts with the continuous drive to smaller feature sizes and lower operating voltages that all IC manufacturers are pursuing".

"The reduction in operating voltage of ICs has other knock-on effects in how the supply to the IC's is regulated from the vehicle powernet".

"It is not as common to use a linear regulator now that the primary power consumers are at 3.3V or less, hence switching regulators and the noise these produce and the magnetic components they require add additional constraints to the automotive circuit design that are being driven primarily by the IC".

"The Automotive EMC Network are therefore delighted that Etienne Sicard will be presenting our keynote paper and looking at what can be done at the IC level to ensure the requirements of the automotive EMC environment can be met".

Sicard is a world renown authority and distinguished lecturer on the topic of EMC at the IC level, having written many papers, software and books on the topic and has a new publication due this spring ("EMC of ICs: techniques for low emission and susceptibility", co-authored with S Ben Dhia, M Ramdani and E Sicard, Springer, 2006).