A proposed set of specific standard EMC problems to help engineers evaluate EMC modeling tools

As the complexity of high-speed electronic system packages increase, engineers and designers are required to take control of more and more aspects of electrical and mechanical engineering early in the design cycle. In order to achieve the objective of faster time-to-market and to be cost effective one needs to be able to predict the electromagnetic radiated emission noises of the system design by using full-wave simulation tools. Modifications and improvements of the design can be easily tested with simulators to reach the best possible compromise between EMC requirements and cost/thermal/etc considerations. The key contribution of this work is to provide a collection of a set of four standard problems faced by any typical system designer and example solutions from different tools by different users. The proposed standard problems include a power/ground plane decoupling problem, a printed circuit board with a microstrip trace which runs over a split in the ground reference plane, a heatsink emissions problem, and a shielding effectiveness problem. In this paper, each of these problems is described, and an example result provided.