There are many factors that contribute to the pressures
placed on EMC Engineers during product development.
These factors can be lumped into four major categories
when developing new products. One category is
“technology advancement” which has to do with how
new technologies of the future will be designed and
whether EMC control is a serious consideration,
especially at the component level. Today, many new
technology standards are initiated and completed without
any consideration for EMC control. As an example, the
Digital Video Interface (DVI) standard came out, a few
years ago, without any EMC control considerations. By
the time the integrated circuit chips were implemented
into a planar motherboard, the emissions generated
caused PCs to fail EMC requirements and regulations.
Controlled impedance connectors were required to
prevent emission failures and at that particular time;
there were no compatible impedance controlled DVI
connectors available fiom any connector manufacturer.
This type of surprise becomes an industry wide problem
when implementing a new technology, but not before
significant EMC resources are spent attempting to
diagnose, model, and simulate the exact emission failure
and solution. Another category is “EMC requirements
and regulations” which change on two levels, one being
at the standards committee level and another as the
country regulation level by technical deviation fiom the
original standard or by required implementation date of a
revised standard. Another category is the “product
development schedule” which is driven by the need to
bring to market new technologies as fast as possible.
There is no slack or contingencies planned into PC
development schedules anymore and this will remain so
in the future. Typical product development cycle last 4