Systematic Description of the Protection Capability of Protection Elements

Higher demands on the safety and stability of electronic systems require the further development of protection concepts against electromagnetic interferences. Especially interferences with an extremely broad frequency bandwidth combined with very high voltage amplitudes are a serious threat against sensitive electronic systems. Due to the very high frequency parts of the interference the behavior of used nonlinear protection circuits depends more and more on parasitic linear components. Therefore it is of special interest in which circumstances a system can be declared as protected against electromagnetic interferences. For that a definition of the term "is protected" has to be discussed due to a definition of different success levels. These success levels are correlated with effects that can occur in the system which can also be classified. Together with a description of the prediction of effect threshold levels in complex systems this paper describes a method for determining the protection capability of possible protection elements.