10 views from the IEEE EMC 2016

Article By : Arturo Mediano

Those who make EMI/EMC measurements for debugging, will find the RTO/RTE oscilloscopes quite useful.

A few months ago, I covered the announcement for the IEEE EMC 2016 Symposium in Ottawa, Canada. Here are some of the products I found most interesting.

As always, I found going to the EMC Symposium a worthwhile trip. There were plenty of conferences, technical presentations, networking, and exhibits featuring tools and equipment for the EMI/EMC and signal-integrity practitioner. This year, they Symposium had more than 100 companies exhibiting. Figure 1 gives you a view of the exhibit hall.

__Figure 1:__ *A partial view of the IEEE EMC 2016 exhibit hall.*

Here are 10 of the products I found most interesting. I've organised them into groups of like equipment so you don’t have to scroll through 10 pages to see it all.

Rohde and Schwarz RTO oscilloscope

If you make EMI/EMC measurements for debugging, you'll find the RTO/RTE oscilloscopes quite useful. These instruments have excellent signal fidelity and high acquisition rate to analyse your systems in both the time domain and frequency domain.

The RTO 2000 series samples at up to 20Gsample/s, has bandwidths from 600MHz to 4GHz, and include up to 16-bit resolution. You can use them to find signal faults because the oscilloscopes can display 1 million waveforms/s. That's helpful for EMI susceptibility and signal-integrity troubleshooting.

In my opinion, the triggering capabilities in both time and frequency domains is one of the most useful features. Combined with up to 4 channels, you can obtain a full view of the behaviour of your failing systems and locate the origin of emissions or of susceptible areas in your PCB.

I had the opportunity to try this instrument for a few days several months ago and enjoyed it. In Figure 2, you can see demo with near field probes.

__Figure 2:__ *R&S RTO/RTE oscilloscopes let you perform EMI/EMC debugging in both the time domain and frequency domain.*

Keysight Technologies EMI receiver

At the Keysight booth, I spoke with EMC business manager Mark Terrien, who explained some of the company's new products. For example, the N9038A MXE EMI Receiver (Figure 3).

__Figure 3:__ *The N9038X EMI receiver from Keysight Technologies.*

This instrument is one of the X-Series signal analysers intended for pre-compliance measurements and diagnostic evaluation of your designs. But, it's also a standard compliant receiver for CISPR 16-1-1 and MIL-STD-461.

The N9038A's short overall scan time with time-domain scanning enabled by fast FFT scans lets you quickly find frequencies of your equipment's peak emissions. Its user interface includes a strip chart, markers, span zoom, zoom span, and spectrograms.

Amplifier Research handheld analyser

AR is well known for its RF solid-state amplifiers for EMC immunity and RF testing. Output powers range from 1W to 50kW and they cover the frequency range from DC to 1GHz. I had the opportunity to talk with Joseph Diesso (VP corporate marketing) who kindly demonstrated many of the company's products.

I liked the new SM400K (Figure 4), a high-performance handheld analyser designed for measuring complex or pulsed electric and magnetic fields up to 400kHz, and broadband measurements up to 40GHz.

__Figure 4:__ *The new SM400K from AR.*

The SM400K has interchangeable sensor heads. Its X, Y and Z analog outputs let you locate the origin of emissions. Battery life is more than 70 hours and the data logger supports up to 21,000 measurement samples.

With the ARwavewARe software application, you can analyse the recorded data in both the time domain and the frequency domain. The software provides real-time processing and post-processing capabilities.

I expect these kind of probes gain in importance in the coming years because the new regulations for EM exposure. Be prepared to use them, especially for big industrial or medical installations.

 
Next: Troubleshooting tools: scanners and current probes »

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