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EMC troubleshooting

There is no doubt that troubleshooting EMC is not an easy task. Our company is the only company in the UK with an established and unique relationship with one of the leading EMC labs in the whole of the UK.

As a result of our partnership, we are able to offer our customers an A+ service where both our experts and the experts work together to resolve the customer's issue. We have been able to solve a large number of EMC cases together over the years.

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List potential solutions

The first step we take when troubleshooting an EMC issue is to create a list of all the possible solutions that we might be able to suggest. Depending on the circumstances, this may vary from case to case. An example of a typical list would be the following:

It might be necessary to add a bulk capacitor, or to add a 4 microHenry inductance in the cable X, or to add an X capacitor, a common mode filter, etc.

The implementation of each solution is the next step

Once we have our list of solutions, we start implementing them one at a time once we have the list. In order to find a solution that solves the problem, we have to repeat the measurements until we come up with one that works. It is common for us to continue working through the list until we have reached a satisfactory solution, even if we have already found an initial solution.

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Radiated emissions spectrogram with limit lines in EMC electromagnetic compatibility test

more EMC critical testing

In some cases, our customers may come to us after they have failed conductive emission tests, but we recommend our customers to do some precompliance tests on other tests that for that particular application may be critical in order to ensure that they are compliant. There are various kinds of tests that can be performed here, such as radiated emission tests, surge tests, fast transients, etc. In this case, we will repeat steps 1 and 2 if it is necessary in order to reach a high level of confidence that we may be able to redesign the site successfully.

Implementing the solution

We will finally implement the solution on your hardware at the end of our service.

If you would like to ensure that all the fixes have been effectively implemented, we highly recommend that you get us involved in redesigning both the electronic and the printed circuit board to ensure that all the fixes are effectively implemented. As long as the design is done using Altium Designer, we can provide this service to our customers.

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Final EMC compliance test

We recommend that our customers use us during the final EMC testing since there is still a chance that there may be a problem. The nature of the test does not allow us to guarantee that we will pass, but despite this, we haven't failed any of the tests we've done so far, which is a remarkable achievement!