EMC4pcb Consulting core competency is our automotive system engineering approach to EMC compliance design and testing.
Often even experienced designers of automotive electronic systems and products make design decisions that ultimately make it difficult for their products to meet the automotive EMC requirements. Basic design flaws such as improper grounding, poor trace routing, and ineffective decoupling and filtering are widespread throughout the industry. Even a bad harness or a Load Box that is not optimized for EMC or a test monitoring equipment that is not built correctly will make your product fail the testing!
Historically having relatively long development cycles allowed a test-and-fix design strategy. EMC problems that couldn’t be fixed were often dealt with by waivers of the requirement by the OEM. Today however there is no opportunity to experiment with multiple iterations of the hardware design during development and waivers of the EMC requirements are harder to obtain.
A typical DV or PV Test cost is ranging from US$50,000 for a simple product like a sensor to way over US$200,000 for a ECU or Airbag Module. When including the necessary EMC Loadboxes, Harnesses and Monitoring equipment a simple validation becomes very expensive to fail!
We at EMC4pcb are experts in EMC and PCB layout and will work closely with our customers providing consulting and guidance for EMC and PCB designs through the development process in the following main areas:
EMC Consulting
You can consider us for all of your EMC / EMI / ESD / Electrical Transients, Pulses, RF circuits (LF 125KHZ, 315MHZ, Z-Wave, ZigBee, Wi-Fi ..etc) Emissions or Immunity problems.
We will start from the System Level and go through a rigorous EMC Checklist. We will cover PCB layer stack-up, floor planning, grounding shielding, enclosure restrictions etc.
During schematics review we cover I/O interfaces, filters, decoupling / bypassing, connectors and circuit protection, etc.
We can review EMC Testing that failed and come up with recommendations on how to fix problems….and many more aspects that we can not cover here on a short web page.
PCB Design
We can work on your design using either your PCB Designer or we can use our expert, choice is yours. Please let us know your choice when returning the Quotation Questionnaire.
During the EMC design review we will identify problems that will need to be fixed before going to the next level of testing.
EMC Loadboxes, Harnesses and Monitoring equipment
Too often project teams will use for the EMC / Electrical testing the same Loadboxes and monitoring equipment that they use for HW or SW development.
Automotive OEM’s require that the EMC Loadbox and monitoring scheme to be reviewed and approved by their responsible EMC engineer before the official DV or PV testing is started. We at EMC4pcb have developed hundreds of EMC loadboxes, breakout boxes, harnesses, and monitoring equipment using real or simulated loads! Sometimes we had to go to such extremes that we developed special EMC boxes for emission testing and a different type for Immunity testing!
Contact us and we can help your design team or directly your loadbox manufacturer in the process. We also know some companies who over the years have built successfully EMC loadboxes, harnesses and Monitoring equipment.
EMC Test Plans, Testing and Certifications
With over 300 EMC Test plans that in the past carried our name on them we have the experience to help your team draft a EMC Test plan that will be easily approved by the OEM’s EMC engineer.
We can help on negotiating along your team the Test Plan requirements with the OEM EMC engineer; this will make your future DV or PV Testing easier.
If required we can participate at the EMC test lab to personally witness testing and potential problems. We also have experience on participating to OEM’s EMC Vehicle testing if necessary.
For wireless products, we can help you with the FCC Certification documents preparation pre-compliance verification and interface to the Test House to make you work easier and quicker.