EMC Personality Profile

Congratulations to the Newly Elected IEEE Fellows!

In 2006, five members that were evaluated by the EMC Society Fellow Evaluation Committee were elected to the IEEE Fellow Grade. I believe this is the largest number of new EMC Society Fellows that have been elected in any one-year period. In order to qualify for election to the Fellow grade, a member must have made a significant contribution to their field of endeavor. I would like to offer my congratulations to our five new Fellows: Flavio Canavero, James Drewniak, Antonio Orlandi, Andrew Podgorski and Masamitsu Tokuda for being elected to the Fellow Grade. These five new fellows are our EMC Personality Profiles for this issue of the Newsletter.

Professor Flavio Canavero has a PhD degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters Degree from Politecnico di Torino, Italy. He is a Professor of Electromagnetic Compatibility and Circuit Theory at the Politecnico di Torino. Professor Canavero was elected to the Fellow Grade as a Research Engineer/Scientist “for contributions to the modeling of circuits and electronic interconnects.” He has significantly contributed to the transient analysis solution of lossy and dispersive transmission lines with nonlinear terminations and interfering fields. More recent contributions have been in the area of macromodeling of nonlinear devices such as drivers and receivers for modeling critical paths, etc. The contributions of Professor Canavero include modeling the entire signal transmission chain from the driver to the receiver via the bus including possible discontinuities. The results obtained and the methodologies developed constitute a significant contribution to the advancement of applied electronics engineering. Professor Canavero has authored a number of papers that have been published in the IEEE Transactions on EMC and other technical journals. He received a Best Paper Award at the International Symposium on EMC (EMC Roma, September 1996) for his contribution on “Interconnect Models for Commercial Simulators” that proposed a simple procedure to include transient models of electrically long multiconductor lines with low frequency-dependent losses in circuit simulators. He also extended the approach of line solution via convolution to include the effects of external interference with the generation of Spice-ready equivalent circuits as published in the special issue of the Transactions on EMC, August 1996. Professor Canavero has been very involved in professional activities both within the IEEE and other professional organizations, particularly the International Union of Radio Science (URSI). He just completed a three-year term as Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on EMC, and is now serving as Technical Editor of the Practical Papers, Articles and Application Notes Section of the EMC Newsletter.

Professor James L. Drewniak received the PhD, Masters and Bachelors degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a Curator’s Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering as well as the Director of the Materials Research Center at the University of Missouri-Rolla. Professor Drewniak was elected to the Fellow Grade as a Research Engineer/Scientist “for contributions in electromagnetic interference coupling paths and numerical modeling for EMC design of printed circuit boards.” The results of his research have provided a better understanding of EMI noise sources and coupling paths in printed circuit boards (PCBs). First, the result of Professor Drewniak’s research provides a better understanding of the fundamental physics of EMI coupling paths, including power bus decoupling on multi-layer PCBs, and on fundamental EMI source mechanisms driving common-mode radiation from printed circuit boards. Second, Professor Drewniak’s advanced numerical modeling for EMC design for printed circuit boards includes power distribution and power and signal integrity on complex PCBs. This work was reported in a series of IEEE Transaction papers, authored by Professor Drewniak, et. al., in which advanced numerical modeling techniques were used to better understand the physics associated with the electrical or electromagnetic behavior. Two IEEE EMC Society Symposium papers from the mid 1990s, as well as a recent paper, received “Best Paper Awards.” Professor Drewniak has strong interactions with industry through the university’s UMR EMC Consortium, which he helped establish to better understand the evolving design problems in high-speed digital printed circuit boards. Professor Drewniak is recognized worldwide as a pioneer and an authority in the understanding of the physics of printed circuit board EMI and signal integrity. He has written several papers on the subject, which have been published in the IEEE Transactions on EMC and other IEEE publications. Professor Drewniak has been very active in the IEEE EMC Society. He has chaired several committees including TC-9 Computational Electromagnetics and TC-10 Signal Integrity. Also, he is a past Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on EMC. He has been active in EMC organizations other than IEEE, including EMC Europe and the Zurich International Symposia.

Professor Antonio Orlandi received his “Laurea” degree from the University of Roma “La Sapienza” Rome, Italy. He is a Full Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of L’Aquila. Professor Orlandi was elected to the Fellow Grade as a Research Engineer/Scientist “for contributions to the simulation and design of high-speed digital circuits.” Professor Orlandi’s contributions encompass three areas. They are: (1) modeling of interconnected transmission line networks; (2) modeling of printed circuit board discontinuities such as vias, and (3) incorporation of frequency dependent losses into transmission line analysis. As a result of Professor Orlandi’s work, discontinuities such as vias and branched lines consisting of non-parallel conductors can be modeled using a Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) numerical computational technique. He has pioneered the incorporation of State Variable methods for characterizing transmission line networks with discontinuities and terminated in nonlinear loads. The use of State Variables has provided orders of magnitude reductions in the solution time required for large and complicated printed circuit board networks compared to the conventional solution time using decoupling methods. The use of the State Variables method has allowed an efficient incorporation of nonlinear loads, which was previously very difficult. In addition, the printed circuit board lands have a resistance and an internal inductance that are highly dependent on frequency. This posed a problem that could not be solved using the decoupling method for the transmission line solution for current high-speed digital circuits. Professor Orlandi’s novel use of the Prony method of characterizing this frequency dependency, coupled with a unique method of reducing the computation time required to perform a numerical evaluation of the convolution integral, have made the analysis of lossy lines using the FDTD method very attractive from both speed and accuracy perspectives. Professor Orlandi has also developed accurate macromodels of vias and other transmission line discontinuities by extracting S-parameter models from experimental data. Without these models of vias, accurate calculations of signal and crosstalk on today’s high speed PCBs would not be possible. Professor Orlandi has been very active in the IEEE EMC Society. He was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on EMC and has served on several EMC Society committees. He has authored a number of papers (two of his papers received Best Paper Awards). He received the IEEE EMC Society Technical Achievement Award “for innovative contributions to the numerical modeling and the impact of signal integrity on EMC/EMI in high speed digital systems.” He is co-founder (with Professor Andy Marvin) of the “EMC Aviators Club.” He has a Private Pilot License and a Class A Radio Amateur License (call sign IZOEAD).

Dr. Andrew Podgorski received a Bachelors Degree from the Technical University of Warsaw in Warsaw, Poland. He received his Masters and PhD Degrees from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Dr. Podgorski was elected to the Fellow Grade as a Research Engineer/Scientist “for contributions to broadband immunity and compatibility certification.” He is a Senior Research Associate at the Air Force Research Lab through the National Research Council of Canada. Dr. Podgorski has made noteworthy contributions to research and development in the field of broadband electromagnetics. His research included a study of the broadband phenomena of lightning, the nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and the human electrostatic discharge which can result in pulse rise times as short as 25 picoseconds. Dr. Podgorski’s work includes the development of broadband electromagnetic environments and protection standards. His new approach to EMI/EMC immunity testing and hardness assessment allows one to tailor the radiated immunity test to the specific environment and equipment under test, thereby lowering the cost. He has also developed broadband transmitters, receivers and test facilities. In order to satisfy new EMI/EMC verification requirements, Dr. Podgorski designed and developed broadband antennas with antenna factors (fmax/fmin) greater than 100. These antennas are patented in the USA, Europe, Canada and Japan. They do not have the notches in their patterns that existed with the antennas that were previously used. Currently, NASA, the Swiss Army and the US Army are using these antennas. The availability of broadband antennas led to the development of a Dual Polarization Test Facility that can be used to perform fully automated Radiated Emission and Immunity tests from kHz to 100 GHz in a single facility. The Dual Polarization Test Facility is patented. By using the Dual Polarization Facility, the time required to test one item was reduced from 12 hours to 20 minutes, and a much smaller, less expensive anechoic or semi-anechoic chamber can be used instead of a large facility. The same broadband technology can also be used to improve testing in a reverberation chamber. Dr. Podgorski has been active in the EMC community. He has presented papers at a number of Symposia and he has served on several committees and the IEEE EMC Society Board of Directors.

Professor Masamitsu Tokuda received his PhD, Masters and Bachelors Degrees from The Hokkaido University in Sapporo-shi, Japan. Professor Tokuda was elected to the Fellow Grade as a Technical Leader “for leadership in development and international standardization of electromagnetic compatibility for communication systems.” Professor Tokuda formed a group to pioneer research into emission and immunity problems in telecommunication systems. Unlike ordinary information technology equipment, telecommunications systems are connected to long telecommunication lines which act as antennas and emit and receive EMI. He conducted experiments and determined that the degree of balance and common mode EMI were dominant factors. As a result of this research, he developed the impedance-stabilizing network (ISN) for conducted emissions testing and a coupling and decoupling network (CDN) for conducted immunity testing. Versions 1 and 2 of the international standard (CISPR 22) regarding emissions from information technology equipment regulated only the EMI emitted directly from the AC power line and the equipment enclosure port. However, if a long telecommunications line is connected directly to the information technology equipment, EMI may be emitted through the telecommunication line. Professor Tokuda’s group proposed the use of the ISN for emission tests and the use of common-mode currents for defining emission limits. CISPR was formulated in 1997 and it was adopted world-wide as a compulsory standard for EMI emissions from information technology equipment. When studies started in 1993 for defining an international standard (CISPR 24) regarding the immunity to interference, Professor Tokuda’s group produced a draft for a method of testing the immunity of telecommunications equipment based on the CDN. Professor Tokuda indicated that if the EMI immunity limits that applied to general electronic equipment were applied without modification to information technology equipment, the limits would become excessively stringent and would not be commensurate with the actual audible EMI. Consequently, several countries conducted immunity studies and their findings supported Professor Tokuda’s observations. As a result of these findings, the conducted immunity limits were relaxed. Professor Tokuda has been active in the EMC community. He has authored a number of papers, served on several important committees, and made significant contributions to EMI emission and immunity standards. EMC


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