Technical forum helps EMC design simulation

Flomerics and InterferenceTechnology.com have announced a new technical forum that provides assistance at no charge in simulating electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) design problems.

Flomerics and InterferenceTechnology.com have announced a new technical forum that provides assistance at no charge in simulating electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) design problems.

InterferenceTechnology.com is the only online reference site that is completely devoted to EMC issues and Flomerics is the developer of FLO/EMC, the only software package dedicated to modeling and simulating EMC problems in electronic design.

The forum allows EMC engineers and other interested parties to submit inquiries to Fred German, a product manager for Flomerics who holds a PhD in computational electromagnetics and has over 15 years of experience in applying advanced simulation techniques to real-world design problems in the EMC/EMI and RF/Microwave areas.

"We are very pleased to welcome Flomeric's participation in our "Ask The Expert" forum," said Graham Kilshaw, Publisher of InterferenceTechnology.com.

"Flomerics is the recognized leader in EMC simulation so they are in an ideal position to answer the tough technical questions submitted by visitors to the forum.

In the last year, over 18,000 people have visited Ask the Experts, which demonstrates the thirst for technical solutions in this critical design area." Dr Michael Reynell, Director of Marketing for Flomerics, added that: "We made the decision to partner with Interference Technology because we believe that it is important to disseminate information on EMC modeling to as wide an audience as possible.

Addressing electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) late in the design cycle is becoming less and less tenable as product complexity and densities increase while design cycles continue to shrink.

More and more designers are moving towards the use of conceptual analysis to identify and fix problems early in the design process at much lower cost.

This forum will help newcomers to EMC simulation get started and help those with more experience tackle the toughest problems." As an example of a typical problem addressed in the forum, a participant wrote in to ask: "I have a situation with a fairly large telecom chassis where the majority of the radiated emissions from my system are coming from the cables attached to the front panel.

Do you have any recommendations in terms of the important elements to include in the model so that I have the best chance of simulating the system accurately?" German answered: "I would try to use the simulation to understand which coupling mechanism is dominating.

If you have the possibility of measuring the common mode current, you could inject that current in the cables in the simulation to check that the simulation shows the same emission characteristics that you have experienced and then use the various visualization and analysis tools available in the modeling software to help identify the root cause of the problem.

For example, you could potentially examine the field and surface distributions which could help identify the coupling path.

Once the right coupling mechanism is identified, the simulation can also help in finding solutions to break that particular coupling mechanism (filters, grounding points, etc).".

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