EMC & Circuit Protection
Automating EMC testing E
By Nicholas Forsyth, senior engineer at TÜV SÜD, a global product testing and certification organisation
MC compliance is a mandatory requirement in most markets, including Europe, the US, China, Korea, Australia and New Zealand. In the European Union, the vast majority of finished electronic products (whether battery or mains powered) must comply with the EMC Directive 2014/30/EU, as well as other relevant directives, before they can carry the CE marking and be sold. In the UK this directive has been replaced by the Electromagnetic Compatibility Regulations 2016, and products must comply with this before they can carry the UKCA mark. To comply with market requirements and avoid costly recalls, manufacturers in industries such as consumer products, medical devices, industrial machinery, railway, automotive, aerospace and military equipment must ensure that electromagnetic disturbances do not interfere with other users or with the function of their products.
EMC testing ensures that products meet regulatory requirements. It also reduces the risk of a costly non-compliance and improves product performance by avoiding failures in use, which could require product recalls or cause significant time-to-market delays for new products. As manufacturers are also under pressure to maintain quality, minimising the costs and time associated with EMC testing is vital.
EMC standards have evolved to include broader frequency ranges and increased bandwidths, and the electromagnetic environment is becoming more congested with intentional and unintentional sources. This means that the requirement to measure and control them needs to change as well. Test methods must therefore adapt to emulate the environment and automation has increasingly become a requirement. Consequently, in EMC testing there is a shift from a manual to an automated approach. In many cases software helps a great deal to speed up pre-test verification, by using the same parameters each time the test is performed. If set up properly, the software will take that data and allow the user to observe performance trends
18 September 2024
provision of fast, reliable and repeatable testing procedures.
There is also a need to automate the measurement of radiated and conducted emissions. Although the test equipment can be fully automated, there is still the need for engineers to configure the Equipment Under Test (EUT) to be in its desired mode of operation for each test. Now, if we consider a technology such as WiFi, there are many combinations of bandwidths, modulation schemes, frequencies and power levels that need to be tested. By automating the EUT, tests can be left alone to execute for hours and hours, without the need for engineers to intervene. This improves the consistency of results, improves staff efficiencies and allows more testing to be completed than ever before.
The automation of many aspects of EMC testing means that engineers no longer have to sit in a chamber drive room, watching tests being performed until they are complete. This automation means one engineer can operate tests in multiple chambers simultaneously - increasing the accuracy of results and reducing the time-to- markets for new products.
that would take considerably more time if performed manually.
Testing resources are finite, and as the market evolves there is a growing demand for EMC test laboratories to do more with the same resources. Despite this complexity, EMC testing must remain accurate and consistent. To be more effective, EMC testing needs to evolve along the lines of Industry 4.0. For EMC testing, an automated software algorithm can use modelled test data to verify what output should be expected from the system under test. A machine learning tool can be trained on thousands of good
Components in Electronics
and bad data sets and can identify if the shape of a trace shown on a plot is correct. Machine learning eliminates the need for plots to be manually checked by engineers and supervisors, but the reality is that not all decisions can be fully automated, as human planning and interpretation are still key to successful EMC testing.
Manually measuring characteristics of a device to compliance standards is arduous, time-consuming and prone to error. These difficulties are set to grow as products increase in complexity with their adoption of newer technologies. Automation of the test process reduces delays through the
Likewise, automated report generation allows results in tabular and graphical format to be produced in seconds. This means bottlenecks in producing reports at the end of testing are avoided completely. In addition, the information is 100 per cent correct as it is assembled directly from the result data, which eliminates errors and reduces time spent checking reports. Poor EMC can negatively impact product performance and function in a variety of ways. EMC testing helps to ensure that your device will continue to function as expected in the intended EMC environment. As manufacturers are under pressure to maintain quality, minimising the costs and time associated with EMC testing is vital. New automation techniques help to streamline the test process in the laboratory and ensures that the product’s time-to- market is optimised, and costs minimised.
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