"Summertime EMC reading should be brief, relaxing, thought provoking and mildly humorous"(anonymous). Many thanks to Chris Kendall (CKC Laboratories) for sharing a brief EMC tale.

Why Mom Told You Not To Point . . . The Other Reason

In 1979, Chris was consulting for Rockwell International on the Hellfire Missile program. The helicopter mounted version of the Hellfire had to undergo a 300 kV ESD test (discharged from a 500 pF capacitor). The testing was being conducted at the Redstone National Armory EMC laboratory (Huntsville, Alabama), at that time under the direction of Charlie Ponds. "This was the largest ESD discharge I had ever heard about and I was excited to be able to witness it," says Chris. During the test that Chris was witnessing, the laboratory staff shared an incredible story from a few weeks earlier. One of the Hellfire project engineers had been rightfully amazed at the arc created by 300 kV discharges. He couldn't help but point and exclaim, "Look at that!" The next discharge went to the engineer's finger instead of the EUT! The impact knocked him some 15 feet from where he was standing. Charlie Pond's sage wisdom from the event: "Never point at 300 kV."

Austria [see photos]

Kurt Lamedschwandner (ARC Seibersdorf Research), Chapter Chair, tells us that on June 12, the Austria Chapter of the EMC Society re-elected its chairman (Dipl.-Ing. Kurt Lamedschwandner), its secretary (Dr. Gerhard Diendorfer) and its treasurer (Dipl.-Ing. Gerhard Horak). A new vice chairman (Assistant Professor Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Gunter Winkler from the Technical University of Graz) was elected. The former vice chairman (Dipl.-Ing. Helmut Habel) stepped down because of lack of time. Mr. Lamedschwandner thanked Mr. Habel for his contributions to the Society! After the election, Dr. Gerhard Diendorfer gave a very interesting lecture about actual results of lightning discharge research in Austria. After Dr. Diendorfer's presentation, chapter members enjoyed socializing.

Beijing [see photos]

The 3rd International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility was held in Beijing, China on 21 to 24 May 2002. The Symposium was sponsored by the Chinese Institute of Electronics and Technically Co-Sponsored by the IEEE EMC Society. Len Carlson, a member of the EMC Society Board of Directors, was the general co-chair of the Beijing EMC Symposium. Some 200 international and national experts, scholars and scientists attended the conference. A total of 230 papers were received of which 193 were accepted and collected in the Symposium Record. The papers were presented in 24 technical sessions which was more than the 1992 and 1997 symposia combined. It is clear that the field of EMC technology has expanded dramatically in the last ten years. During the closing ceremony, Symposium Chairman Professor Gao Yougang expressed his deep appreciation for the support given to the symposium by the IEEE EMC Society and the URSI E-Commission. He announced that the next International Symposium on EMC will be held in China in 2007. (NOTE: This issue of the EMCABS contains abstracts from papers presented in Beijing, China during May 21-24, 2002. Please refer to page 46 to view these papers.)

Central New England

John Clarke, Chapter Chair, advised there has been one meeting since those reported in the previous Spring issue of the Newsletter. Doug Smith presented a topic to the CNE members concerning "Computer Security" on Wednesday, June 26th. This was not an official meeting of the IEEE Boston Section (official Chapter meetings are not usually held in June, July or August). Vice Chair Boris Shusterman hosted the meeting as usual. The annual joint EMCS/NPSS meeting will be held in September (note: NPSS is Northeast Product Safety Society). We are pleased that DL Bud Hoeft will present a topic to our chapter on October 18th, during his "East Coast chapter presentation tour." The 2003 IEEE EMC Symposium Steering Committee met on May 7th. Vice Chair Boris Shusterman attended as the assigned Hospitality Coordinator. A number of other EMCS members are on the 2003 Committee, some with specific committee assignments. EMCS Distinguished Lecturer Committee Chairman Lee Hill and Isidor Straus are Technical Program Co-Chairs. The Symposium will be held August 18-22, 2003 in Boston. Please watch EMCS publications for more details!

Chicago [see photos]

Frank Krozel (Electronic Instrument Associates), Chapter Treasurer, shared highlights from the recent mini-symposium in Chicago. They had twenty tables booked by enthusiastic exhibitors and approximately 120 program attendees. It is interesting to note that 50% or more of the attendees were non-members! Hopefully, this will mean a positive influx of new people into the EMC Society in the Chicago area! This year, the chapter tried to have several symposium sessions with a variety of topics, rather than only one or two main sessions. The sessions varied from 1/2 hour to 2 hours in length. The new format was well received by the attendees. Frank also reports that they have booked a date for next year's mini-symposium. Watch the chapter Website, https://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/emcs/chicago/ for details!

France

André Berthon, Chapter Chair, reports that the French chapter recently held a board meeting dedicated to the planning of further meetings. The chapter will be supporting an EMC event being organized by INSA Toulouse. The upcoming workshop, dedicated to electromagnetic compatibility for ICs, will be held in Toulouse, France, Nov 14-15th, 2002. The IEEE France section will be sponsoring the event. More information may be found at www.insa-tlse.fr/~emccompo. An official call for papers has been issued for such topics as measurement methods for emissions of integrated circuits, use of IC models in printed circuit board simulation, tools to handle EMC at the IC level and more. Please E-mail etienne.sicard@insa-tlse.fr for more information.

Japan

Yoshio Kami (University of Electro-Communications), Chapter Chair, shared that the IEEE EMCS Japan Chapter is growing steadily, with their current chapter membership at 276, as of December 31, 2001. They held numerous technical meetings this past year. Regular EMC technical meetings are held ten times per year at various venues. These meetings are co-sponsored with meetings of the EMC Technical Group of the Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineers (IEICE). Many technical papers are presented every year, the majority of these being in Japanese. In 2001, about 130 papers were presented as shown in the following table.

One of the biggest news items from Japan is the formation of the Sendai chapter. Please see their chapter report for details! Many members in Japan attend the IEEE International Symposium every year. In 2004, Japan will host an "international" EMC Symposium in Sendai on June 1 through 4. This will be the fifth EMC symposium held in Japan over the past 25 years. Professor Sugiura of Tohoku University was appointed as a Chair of the Organizing Committee.

Korea

Professor Dong Il Kim (Korea Maritime University), Chairman, reports that the Korea Chapter hosted a "Workshop on Antenna Technology" at the Seoul Education Center on April 26, 2002. The six presentations covered various aspects of antenna theory, including Professor Tatsuo Itoh's paper titled "Active Integrated Antenna Approach for New RF Front End Configuration." The workshop was attended by 200 participants and was coordinated by the Korea Electromagnetic Engineering Society (KEES) and IEEE AP/MTT Korea Chapter. Also, the Korean chapter co-sponsored the "2002 Spring Conference on Microwave/Radio" at SungKyunKwan University on May 25, 2002. Papers presented at the conference covered various aspects of the electromagnetic field including active/passive circuits and components, EMI/EMC, antenna and scattering. A total of 143 papers were given and about 270 participants attended the conference, which was coordinated by KEES and the IEEE AP/MTT Korea Chapter.

Minneapolis

Curt Sponberg (Medtronic), Chapter Chair and Symposium Vice-Chair, reports that the Twin Cities chapter is very busy with preparations for the 2002 IEEE International Symposium on EMC which will be held August 19 to 23 at the Minneapolis Convention Center. Please visit the web site at https://www.2002-ieee-emc.org/ for information on registration, exhibits, technical presentations and registrations. The chapter hopes that you all can make it to Minneapolis this year!

Montréal [see photos]

Benoît Nadeau (Matrox), Chapter Chair, told Chapter Chatter that organizing the 2001 Symposium limited the "normal" chapter activities of the Montreal Chapter last year. In 2002, they returned to a traditional Chapter meeting schedule. They have had three meetings since January 1. The first presentation, by Keith Hardin, Distinguished Lecturer, was held April 23, 2002. Keith combined two of his popular topics into one presentation entitled "Two Layer PCB Design and Design Techniques." The meeting was a huge success with more than 30 participants, including attendees who traveled from Ontario and Quebec City! On May 21, 20 people attended a presentation that was arranged as a direct result of the 2001 Symposium. Donald Davis (Ph.D. student of the famous Dr. Tom Pavlasek at McGill University) and Dr. Bernard Segal (also from McGill and Workshop Chairman for the 2001 Symposium). The subjects of their talks were, respectively, "Volumetric 1.9-GHz Fields in a Hospital: EMC Implications" and "Risk of Patient Injury Due to EMI: Estimation & Minimization." Both papers were originally presented during the 2001 Symposium. The third meeting, held on June 5, was headlined by another IEEE EMCS Distinguished Lecturer. Mr. Colin Brench presented "Antenna Behavior and Use (What Really Goes on During a Test?!)." This time, the outside temperature did not help. After many days of bad weather, the weather on June 5 was very nice and many potential attendees stayed home to barbecue! Nevertheless, they achieved an audience of 13 enthusiastic engineers.

Nanjing

Professor Wen Xun Zhang, Chapter Chair, reports that the Nanjing Chapter hosted a busy Spring schedule of meetings and technical presentations! Professor Ismo Lindell of Helsinki University of Technology gave four well-attended lectures on April 6, 9, 11 and 20. His topics included "Conditions for Field Media," "Field Duality and Affine Transformation," "Electromagnetic Field Solutions" and "Field Decomposition." On May 17 and 21, audiences of 64 and 61 (respectively), enjoyed a lecture by Professor Ke Wu entitled, "RF & Microwave Techniques in Wireless Communications Systems." Professor Wu is from the Ecole Polytechnique Institute of Montreal, Canada. The next evening, the chapter sponsored a presentation by senior engineer Yong-Sheng Dai on "Modeling and Design of Control Circuits." The presentation was enjoyed by 24 members and guests. The chapter capped off an incredible six day run with 61 people enjoying a double-header presentation by Professor Jin-Ping Xu of Southeast University and Professor Ru-Shan Chen of Nanjing University of Science and Technology. The presentation by Professor Xu was entitled "Vector Finite Element & Domain Decomposition Hybrid Techniques" and Professor Chen spoke about "Finite Element Short-Open Calibration for Extracting Microwave Network Parameters."

Orange County [see photos]

Robert Tozier (CKC Laboratories), Chapter Chair, reports that the Orange County Chapter met on May 14th at CKC Laboratories in Brea. The topic was, "Shielding Effectiveness: A Practical View." Speaker Douglas Smith held an FCC First Class Radiotelephone license by age 16 and a General Class amateur radio license at age 12. He received a B.E.E.E. degree from Vanderbilt University in 1969 and an M.S.E.E. degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1970. In 1970, he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories as a Member of the Technical Staff. He retired in 1996 as a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff. Doug's talk covered shielding effectiveness from different points of view including cable and system shielding. Examples and demonstrations of shielding problems and fixes were presented. Douglas demonstrated a method of measuring shielding effectiveness that is easy to perform and gives better results.

Phoenix [see photos]

Harry Gaul (General Dynamics), Chapter Secretary/Treasurer, reports on their May 2nd meeting where Daryl Gerke of Kimmel-Gerke Associates was the speaker. Daryl is also the Vice-Chair of the Phoenix EMC Chapter. The topic of Daryl's talk was the "Mysteries of Grounding" which covered one of the most important, yet most misunderstood aspects of EMC. Grounding tends to be mysterious because there's no one rule for all the different types of grounds such as analog, digital, safety, and chassis. Also, there are various approaches used for grounding including multi-point, single point, and hybrid. As many of us EMC practitioners know, it often seems that there are as many opinions as there are answers to the proper approach for grounding. When assessing the adequacy of grounds, Daryl recommends that one first look at the ground from a 60Hz perspective and then see what it looks like at 100MHz. Finally, one must ask, "What do I want it to look like?" Generally, a frequency of 10kHz is used as the dividing point between low frequency signals that should be single point grounded and high frequency signals that should be multi-point grounded. However, Daryl pointed out that power supply chopper frequencies often fall midway between low frequency and high frequency and that is why their emissions are so difficult to control. Daryl covered the entire gamut of grounding concepts for the 40 attendees. He stressed that earth ground has only one purpose and that is safety and it must prevail over all the other needs for grounding. Too often we defeat the safety ground in order to "improve" the signal-to-noise characteristics of our instrumentation and communication circuits. A variety of methods can be used to break ground loops at low frequencies such as balanced circuits, optoisolators, transformer coupling, and grounding the return at only one end. At high frequencies one needs to use multi-point grounding such as planes or grids with ground points spaced no further than 1/20 of a wavelength apart and bond straps with a length-to-width ratio no greater than 5:1. Daryl concluded his talk with several practical grounding examples including hybrid grounds, which combine low and high frequency grounding schemes so that one can "have their cake and eat it too!" Please check out the Phoenix web site at https://www.ewh.ieee.org/r6/phoenix/phoenixemc/ for the latest schedule on upcoming meetings.

Seattle [see photos]

In August of 2000, the IEC published Amendment 1 to CISPR 22. This amendment adds ferrite clamps to all cables leaving the turntable when testing tabletop equipment. The purpose of these clamps is to improve repeatability between different laboratories when performing radiated emissions measurements. The immediate practical effect of this amendment is a significant difference in measurement methods between CISPR 22 and ANSI C63.4-2000. As a result, when this amendment is adopted in countries which use CISPR 22 (or EN 55022 as it is known in Europe), a manufacturer will be forced to perform radiated emissions tests on a product twice, once with the clamp and once without the clamp. In the interest of harmonization, ANSI C63.4 may need to be updated to include these clamps. At the April Seattle EMC Chapter meeting, two speakers familiar with this issue gave presentations. First, Ghery Pettit of Intel, Dupont described Amendment 1 to CISPR 22, and provided some of the history of the change and work that was performed by Intel Corporation and Hewlett Packard to evaluate the change as it worked its way through CISPR Subcommittee I in 1999 and 2000. He showed the effectiveness of these clamps in improving repeatability between labs and a key design consideration for the clamps that was not considered in the amendment. Stephen Berger of TEM Consulting then presented information on the work that is on-going in ANSI C63 to possibly add ferrite clamps to ANSI C63.4. This work is being done by people representing test equipment manufacturers, as well as representatives from companies manufacturing products which are tested for immunity to ESD events. The presentations concluded with time for questions and answers about this new requirement and how it might impact product testing efforts. In May, EMCS Distinguished Lecturer Keith Hardin of Lexmark presented "Various Aspects of Spread Spectrum Clock Generation, (SSCG)" to the Seattle EMC Chapter. Dr. Hardin explained how SSCG intentionally broadbands a normally narrowband signal by frequency modulating the trapezoidal clock signal with a unique modulating waveform. The modulating waveform causes a digital clock signal to have a spectrum with sideband harmonics that are nearly uniform in amplitude when measured with an EMI receiver. This has the effect of spreading the energy of a discrete frequency harmonic over a wider bandwidth, thereby reducing the amplitudes of the harmonics. SSCG can reduce emission amplitudes as much as 2 - 22 dB, depending on the frequency of measurement and the frequency deviation. The presentation discussed the background that led to this invention and the issues a designer should be aware of when using this technology. A highlight of the evening was the informal exchange of information among those present when Dr. Hardin passed around samples of a variety of different printed circuit boards. Everyone enjoyed analyzing the layouts shown.

Sendai

Akira Sugiura, Chapter Secretary, shared the background and coming events of the new Sendai (Japan) Chapter. Considered to be the birthplace of the Japanese EMC Society, the Sendai district has long been one of the more active areas for EMC in Japan. In 1977, Professors R. Sato and T. Takagi organized the first EMC Technical Group for the IEICE Japan, and then organized the IEEE EMC Society Tokyo Chapter the following year. It is with great pleasure that we announce that a Sendai Chapter was officially approved by the IEEE EMC Society on December 20th, 2001. The new Chapter has 33 members including Professor Sato (Chair), Professor Takagi (Vice-chair), and Professor Sone (Treasurer). The chapter is now focusing every effort to make arrangements for the 2004 EMC Sendai International Symposium (June 1 to 4, 2004). Why is Sendai the first "regional" EMC Chapter in Japan? The Japanese IEEE membership is so huge (more than 18,000 members) that it first established eight regional sections with "umbrella" chapters for each society. The EMC Japan Chapter will exist until all Regional Sections form EMC Chapters, such as was just formed at Sendai.

Toronto

Ramesh Abhari (University of Toronto), Chapter Chair, let us know that the most recent technical meeting held by the Toronto chapter was on February 15, 2002. The lecture was entitled, "Discrete Steps in Field Space: The Electromagnetic and Other Secrets of MEFiSTo," presented by Professor Wolfgang J.R. Hoefer, NSERC Research Chair in RF Eng., CERL, ECE Dept., University of Victoria, and the President of Faustus Scientific Corporation. The abstract of professor Hoefer's paper, including the presentation slides are available at: https://www.tor.ieee.ca/societies/electromag.htm.

Ukraine [see photos]

Gennadiy Churyumov (Kharkov National University), Chapter Chair, reports that the new Joint AP/C/EMC/SP Chapter of the IEEE Ukraine Section (Kharkov), newly established in 2002 has been very active. This year, they are organizing several technical workshops and chapter meetings. On September 18 to 20, 2002, the First International Workshop on Noise Radar Technology (NRTW'02) will be held in Yalta (Crimea), Ukraine. On October 1, 2002, an International Workshop entitled "The Ultra Wideband and Ultra Short Impulse Signals" (UWB-USIS '02) will occur in Kharkov, Ukraine. The chapter hopes to see everyone at these international technical meetings! EMC