This article presents EMC consulting services, emphasizing the crucial role of EMC consultants in achieving compliance for PCB design projects. It showcases how external expertise can mitigate expensive redesigns and facilitate a smoother route to EMC compliance, ultimately accelerating the time-to-market for your products.
Explore how leveraging the knowledge of DENPAFLUX’s EMC consulting services can significantly improve your PCB design outcomes, making compliance a seamless part of your product development journey!
1. The Role of an EMC Consultant in Passing EMC Compliance Tests
Printed circuit board (PCB) design is an increasingly complex and time-consuming task. Engineers must deal with higher power density, lower noise limits, and wider signal bandwidths while meeting difficult requirements for budget, form factor, and time to market. In addition to all this, boards need to pass electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) testing—which is a challenge on its own, and becomes even more challenging when combined with the size, power, and various other constraints that twenty-first-century engineers and board designers so commonly face.
EMC compliance can be easy to overlook during important phases of product development; schematic design, firmware debugging, board layout, mechanical integration, and environmental testing all require much time and attention from engineering teams. Nonetheless, EMC compliance is critical to a product’s success. Ideally, EMC techniques will be present throughout the development process, but even if EMC is addressed largely at the final stages before product launch, expertise and concerted effort will be needed to ensure that testing goes smoothly. A failed EMC test is a serious impediment that can lead to complex troubleshooting procedures, costly redesigns, and missed market opportunities.
Since EMC testing is such a high-stakes moment in the product development cycle, there is much reason to consider hiring outside help. DENPAFLUX’s EMC consulting services are built upon our extensive experience and adaptable expertise in solving—and more importantly, preventing—EMI (electromagnetic interference) problems. Leveraging the advanced capabilities of our AI-powered EMC analysis tools, we work directly with engineers and board designers to make EMC testing a low-stress, informative, and successful phase of bringing your product to market.
2. Understanding EMC in PCB Design
The essence of EMC is peaceful coexistence: an electronic product must be able to operate safely and correctly in an electromagnetic environment that is shared with other electrical devices and equipment. In practice, this means that a product must comply with limits on the generation of electromagnetic energy and demonstrate immunity to electromagnetic energy that may be present in the product’s operating environment. EMC testing is a means of confirming that a functional electronic device will remain fully functional despite real-world EMI and will allow other devices in its environment to remain fully functional.
EMC is influenced by a product’s schematic design, its mechanical housing, and even its firmware, but the place where most EMC issues arise is the printed circuit board. Proper PCB design is crucial to EMC success, and likewise, many EMC failures result from common layout mistakes. For example:
- Using a two-layer board stackup instead of a four-layer stackup can make a device much more susceptible to received EMI.
- Insufficient grounding reduces the integrity of high-frequency signals.
- A lack of appropriate shielding leaves sensitive components without adequate protection from interference.
- Improper placement of decoupling capacitors makes an integrated circuit less resistant to power-supply disturbances.
- Unmatched impedances degrade high-speed digital signals and lead to increased radiated emissions.
These issues can make a PCB more likely to malfunction when it is exposed to interfering electromagnetic signals. They can also cause the PCB to produce enough conducted or radiated EMI to impair nearby equipment. If this nearby equipment is part of the same system, the device may actually be impairing itself by impairing other devices. Furthermore, design practices that favor EMC may help the product to be more effective and reliable even when it is operating in isolation. For example, reducing separation between the two traces of a differential signal makes the signal more robust against received EMI, but it also protects the signal from noise sources on the same PCB.
3. Benefits of External EMC Consulting
Many engineers graduate and enter the workforce with little if any expertise in EMI countermeasures, EMC regulations, or EMC testing. Furthermore, it is difficult to develop robust EMC knowledge on the job: such knowledge is somewhat scarce in general, misconceptions can become entrenched within a company’s engineering culture, and various other design and testing tasks must usually be given priority.
All of these points argue in favor of bringing in outside expertise. By hiring an EMC consultant, engineers and project managers gain access to important benefits:
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- Specialized experience and knowledge: EMC consultants are well-versed in the latest standards, regulations, and best practices.
- Advanced tools: Companies that are dedicated to EMC have invested in equipment and software that can save time and labor while enhancing results.
- Objective third-party perspective: An external consultant provides an unbiased review of your design, identifying potential issues that internal teams might overlook.
DENPAFLUX consulting services combine all these benefits with proprietary technology that brings a new level of insight and efficiency to the EMC certification process.
4. Key Roles of an EMC Consultant in PCB Design
EMC consultants offer their clients a variety of valuable services, explanations, and recommendations. An excellent EMC consultant is one that not only provides action-oriented guidance but also shares knowledge and techniques that will help to build a rigorous, well-informed EMC culture within the client organization.
One of the most important roles of an EMC consultant is to assist engineering teams in identifying and mitigating EMI issues in all stages of the design cycle—and this includes the earliest stages. Addressing EMC risks at the beginning of product development rather than the end is a key strategy for EMC success, but this involves the comprehensive EMC expertise that many companies lack. EMC consultants can supply this expertise while performing thorough tests and analyses at multiple points during the design cycle. The result of all this is early detection and effective remediation of design features, oversights, and knowledge gaps that could lead to EMC failure.
5. Criteria for Selecting the Right EMC Consulting Service
EMC consultants are not in short supply these days. The challenge is not finding a consultant—it’s finding a consultant that can consistently and efficiently supply an appropriate combination of services. Here’s what to look for when you’re trying to identify an EMC consulting service that’s right for your team:
- Assessment: First of all, the consultant should provide a thorough assessment of your current project, even if it’s only in the ideation phase, and then deliver a plan for moving this project smoothly and systematically through preliminary EMI measurements, EMC pre-compliance evaluations, and official EMC testing.
- Design review: As the project progresses and design files become available, the EMC consultant should be actively reviewing and analyzing the design so that potential issues are identified promptly and discussed with the engineering team.
- Solutions: The consultant should regularly share best practices and deliver practical, proven EMC solutions in response to the concerns and challenges that arise during the design cycle.
6. Success Stories and Case Studies
DENPAFLUX has a proven track record of helping clients achieve EMC compliance through a powerful combination of expert consulting and advanced EMC technology. Stories from two of our past clients help to paint a picture of the valuable services that DENPAFLUX provides.
Failures Resolved and the Schedule Restored:
- Before using DENPAFLUX: A B2B electronics company had around seven thousand devices installed, with 2–3% of them suffering from EMC issues that affected communication at their customer's facilities. The devices required a manual reset, which cost the company between €1000 and €1500 per day.
- After using DENPAFLUX: The team implemented DENPAFLUX recommendations, and as a result, they decreased the time spent on EMC interventions, began mass production on schedule, and were able to free up their in-house EMC/safety expert for new projects.
Reducing Cost, Achieving Compliance:
- Before using DENPAFLUX: A board design team needed to pass certification in order to meet their time-to-market deadlines. The electronic system under development would be subjected to harsh operating environments, and design work was occurring under high pressure.
- After using DENPAFLUX: After implementing Mitai's recommendations, the team was able to incorporate the functionality of three different boards into one board while maintaining EMC compliance, and they reduced production costs across three different products by leveraging economies of scale.
You Don't Need to Face EMC Certification Alone
Printed circuit boards are filled with components and design elements that directly influence the success or failure of EMC testing. The PCB layout really is the critical link between product design and EMC certification, and in some cases, minor modifications to a PCB layout could be enough to prevent a costly EMC failure. DENPAFLUX’s innovative approach to EMC consulting combines engineering expertise with advanced technology to deliver unique preparation for EMC testing.
Contact DENPAFLUX today to see what we can do to help you bring your product to market.
