Susceptibility of Personal Computer Systems to Fast Transient Electromagnetic Pulses

In this paper, the susceptibility of personal computer systems (mainboard class vary from 8088 processor based system up to Pentium III system) to fast transient electromagnetic pulses (EMP) with double exponential pulse shapes [EMP, ultra wideband (UWB)] is determined. The influence of computer generation, random access memory (RAM)-values, program states, and pulse shapes, as well as the destruction thresholds of single personal computer (PC)-components [central processing unit (CPU), RAM, basic input/output system (BIOS), mainboard] have been investigated. The major result is that susceptibility increases significantly with each computer generation