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The automotive industry has increased reliance on electronics technology and wireless communication systems and the demand for these systems is still increasing. With this demand there is a need to ensure these systems do not interfere with each other in a way which may cause system performance degradation or even failure. Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) is a discipline that deals with interaction between electronic and wireless systems. During EMC testing the device under test (DUT) is isolated from the surrounding environment to facilitate measurement of the component’s electromagnetic characteristics. Geometric aspects of an EMC test setup may impact test results without the knowledge of the test engineer. In this paper, electromagnetic simulation and measurement results will show the impact of one of the least obvious but most often experienced issues in an EMC setup - grounding.

Hybrid and electric vehicles utilize high power electric motors to propel the vehicle requiring a significant level of electric current to travel between various modules such as energy storage devices, power inverter modules, energy charging modules, and the motors themselves. This electric current creates magnetic fields around the devices themselves and wiring that delivers this current between devices within the vehicle. These devices and wiring exist throughout the vehicle and can even exist near vehicle occupants, which has prompted investigations looking into the short term biological effect these non-ionizing fields can have on the human body. The findings from these investigations have been published by organizations such as the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), and some nations have passed laws regulating the magnetic and electric field exposure to vehicle occupants.

EMC Component Validation Responsibilities encompass many realms. One of these realms is the effect of magnetic fields on silicon-based devices. This article describes a method for exposing these devices to magnetic fields with waveforms other than the traditional sinusoidal excitation. The method commonly used to explore the sensitivity of active silicon devices is exposure of the device to a representative sinusoidal field and observation of its reaction or lack thereof. The challenge is to characterize the representative field and be able to verify its effectiveness. Recent vehicle level testing of new designs has brought our attention to time-varying or transient magnetic field shapes that create deviations not previously detected with Military Standard 461 (MIL-STD-461) type sinusoidal magnetic field exposure.

With the increasing content of electronics in automobiles and faster development times, it is essential that electronics hardware design and vehicle electrical architecture is done early and correctly. Today, the first designs are done in the electronic format with circuit and CAD design tools. Once the initial design is completed, several iterations are typically conducted in a “peer review” methodology to incorporate “best practices” before actual hardware is built. Among the many challenges facing electronics design and integration is electromagnetic compatibility (EMC). Success in EMC starts at the design phase with a relevant “lessons learned” data set that encompasses component technology content, schematic and printed circuit board (PCB) layout, and wiring using computer aided engineering (CAE) tools.

Whenever a new simulation tool or method is introduced into a product development process, immediately the tool is required to prove its worth before it can be trusted. Typically, this requires a reproduction of results that were originally obtained using physical measurement equipment. Proving out a simulation tool or method has challenges. The challenges include the need to engineer a test representative of the problems that the tool will need to solve but be simple enough for the results to be easily understood. Electromagnetic modeling and simulation tools are able to solve many types of problems, such as determining electromagnetic cross coupling from one conductor to another, the radiation of an electromagnetic field by a conductor, and analyzing impedance of a printed circuit board power distribution network. There are problems that arise in both measurement and modeling techniques but the two used together can overcome the weaknesses of either technique.