Services
Photo by Chen Yang
Training
The best way to solve EMC problems is to not have them in the first place. EMCU offers training that is customized to your needs and schedule. Training can be online or in person, and anywhere from an hour to three days. Sessions can be tailored to your industry and biggest pain points. Karen Burnham is an experienced speaker and educator, having received rave reviews throughout her time as a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE EMC Society. One of her key skill sets is translating EMC to English--her goal is to communicate clearly enough that anyone, from technician to engineer to manager, will understand EMC basics and how to avoid the most common problems.
Karen Burnham talk on Standards (YouTube)
Karen Burnham webinar on Unintentional Antennas (Free with registration)
Reviews
Having an expert eye look over a design prior to prototyping or manufacturing can reveal EMC red flags and help solve problems before they start. EMCU will provide expert reviews at any stage of a program. That can be at the PCB, module, or system level for consumer/commercial electronics, or at the SRR, PDR, CDR, or even FRR level for military/aerospace programs. Reviews will highlight areas of potential risk along with proposed mitigations.
Reviews can also include requirements tailoring--when you go in for EMC testing, you want to make sure that you’re doing the minimum set of testing that will guarantee project success. Standards such as MIL-STD-461 and 464 are often misunderstood and misapplied, leading to expensive “failures” that aren’t actually mission relevant. For more information about the extensive universe of EMC standards, take a look at the “Standards” tab above.
Precompliance Measurements
Finding problems when you’re paying top dollar per hour in a fully accredited EMC lab burns budget and schedule amazingly quickly. EMCU can plan a pre-test campaign and even travel to your facility or a third party lab to perform precompliance measurements--cheaper and easier measurements that give a good indication that a product is on the road to EMC success or reveal issues that can be fixed prior to full compliance testing.
Troubleshooting
When all else fails, EMCU can provide troubleshooting services when a product has failed testing. This can be done remotely or, preferably, on-site.
Every EMC problem has three components--a noisy source, a susceptible victim, and a coupling path between them. The key to efficient troubleshooting is to identify all three elements. At that point you have multiple avenues to attack the problem, allowing you to arrive at the solution with the lowest cost and schedule impact.
Along with diagnosis and recommended solutions, EMCU will also provide education to your staff on what is happening, why, and how it can be avoided in the future. Our goal is always to leave our customer with a full understanding of what happened such that they can avoid suffering through EMC nightmares in the future.