EMC Standards Activities

For a change of pace, instead of my usual standards update article, I wanted to bring to you a short report of an outstanding EMC symposium that I attended and presented part of a workshop sponsored by the IEC Advisory Committee on EMC (ACEC). The author well remembers the first IEEE EMC Symposium in Tokyo in 1984, chaired by Professor Risaburo Sato, where the EMC Society held it first Board meeting outside of the United States. Every five years since, our Japanese colleagues have organized a highly successful symposium and this year was not an exception! It was held at an excellent venue and there was outstanding weather all week. Since this symposium continues the tradition started 20 years ago in Japan, it is important for our members to note the particulars. In any case, here we go.

Martin Alexander of the UK National Physics Laboratory (left) and Manfred Stecher of Rohde & Schwarz are shown getting ready to present their papers.

EMC Board members Bruce Archambeault, Todd Hubing, John Norgard, and Don Heirman enjoy a lunch break during EMC ’04 Sendai.

Fujio Amemiya, Social Program Chair, Don Heirman, and Akira Sugiura, Symposium Chair, (from left) show the “colors” of the EMC Sendai Chapter that was prominent near the registration area. Mr. Amemiya is very active in IEC/CISPR for Japan.

The first week in June in the “city of trees”, Sendai, Japan, was the scene of the 5th IEEE EMC symposium in Japan. The Symposium Committee, ably chaired by Professor A. Sugiura of Tohoku University, noted that the famous Yagi-Uda antenna (eventually used for early TV reception) and the use of magnetrons for microwave ovens were developed in Sendai. Hence, it was a fitting venue in which to hold the symposium on EMC technologies. The sponsors were the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, Communications Society of Japan. The co-sponsor was the Intelligent Cosmos Academic Foundation in Sendai and cooperating organizations included the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and their Technical Committee on EMC, our own EMC Society, the IEEE Sendai Section, the EMCS Japan and Sendai Chapters, URSI, CISPR, and IEC TC77.

Past and present EMCS Board welcome attendees in front of the conference facility in Sendai, including (from left), Bruce Archambeault of IBM, Kimball Williams of Underwriters Laboratories Inc., Shuichi Nitta of Salesiar Polytechnic, Don Heirman of Don HEIRMAN Consultants, Takeo Yoshino of the Historical Museum of the University of Electro-Communications, Todd Hubing of the University of Missouri at Rolla, and John Norgard of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

Boys night out! John, Todd, and Bruce “enjoyed” the sake plant tour and “wine tasting”!

Peter Kerry, Chair of CISPR (left), and Diethard Moehr of Siemens, Secretary of TC77, chat at the symposium banquet.

Around 500 attendees from over 20 countries attended the symposium that had over 230 papers presented in English during the three days of technical events. Major paper topics included PCB and Device Level EMC (47 percent), biological effect and safety (12 percent), EMI/EMC measurements (29 percent), EM absorber and shielding (9 percent) and 8 other subjects rounding out 100 percent of the paper topics. I noted that several of these papers could be of use by our EMC standards development community as references or even as input to amendments! Interestingly, 66 students attended which is an exceptionally high fraction of the total attendees. Eight student paper awards were presented as well as “excellent paper” awards including the “Risaburo Sato Award” which was the premier award at the evening banquet. Professor Sato is with the Sendai EMC Research Center and has been a Japanese EMC icon for decades. In fact, within Japan, he is well known as the “Father of Japanese EMC.” J. Wang and O. Fujiwara of the Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan won this prestigious award with a paper entitled, “A new method for realizing local exposure to young rat heads using electric flux concentration for bio-effect test of mobile telephones.” How about that for basic research! By the way, preceding the banquet, there was a tour of the local sake brewery that whetted our appetites for the banquet indeed.

Bill Radasky, Chair of IEC Advisory Committee on EMC (left), passes along his good impressions of the symposium and banquet to Professor Tokuda, Vice-chairman of the Symposium Steering Committee. Note the “vat” of sake in the background (right).

President Williams tucks in his kimono prior to his congratulatory remarks at the banquet. He looks good in red!

The symposium had no technical exhibits that all the more showed how well an outstanding technical program could still draw a large local and international attendance. Services while at the symposium were also well managed including the tours, arrangements for transportation to and from airports, large break areas with food and beverage throughout the day, etc. There was also an amateur radio “shack” and internet “café” which were well used.
From the Board of Directors of the EMC Society, President Kimball Williams, past president Todd Hubing, Board members Bruce Archambeault, John Norgard, Shuichi Nitta, and Don Heirman, as well as past Board member Takeo Yoshino were present. All renewed acquaintances with our Japanese colleagues and also presented and/or attended papers and workshops. We all mused that we could have held an EMC Society Board meeting if we had only a few more members present to make a quorum.
To summarize, the organizing committee is again to be congratulated for an outstanding technical symposium. There are too many people to thank and we apologize for not naming all of them. However, the symposium proceedings is available from its publisher: The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE, 5-8, Shibakoen 3 chome, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 105-0011, Japan), which contains in addition to the two volumes of papers and one volume of workshop notes, the list of the organizing committee, the overseas members, the technical paper subcommittee members, and the steering committee for your information. In closing, we anxiously await the next Japanese symposium in 2009! EMC