Role of transient/surge suppressors in a typical airborne system. A case study

The increased use of electronic circuitry in the present warfare scenario, demands sophisticated systems with higher density integrated circuits with more accuracy and compact size. As the sophistication/complexity of the system increases their "transient vulnerability" also goes up. Most of the semiconductor devices and other sensitive electronic equipment are easily damaged with transients of high amplitude with fast rise time, with threshold energy levels in the range of microjoules and millijoules, originating from inductive switching loads, nuclear EMP, lightning EMP and ESD. Hence, it is very essential to protect the airborne systems from these "unanticipated change in voltages" (transients), by hardening the system input power supply lines, I/O data and communication lines utilizing various transient suppression techniques. In this paper the author discusses various transient suppression techniques to make the system immune to transients and also some of the practical EMI problems (transient related) are analyzed and solved during the EMI/EMC performance evaluation of electronic systems.