The 2003 IEEE International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC)

11-16th May 2003, Istanbul, Turkey­

 

By Martin O’Hara, Telematica Systems Limited

Introduction

This symposium is the first IEEE International Symposium held outside of the USA (who said the IEEE is a US only organisation?), however, they are still holding a 2nd 2003 EMC Symposium in Boston later this year and as a consequence US attendance was relatively low and mainly restricted to IEEE EMC Society representatives.  The conference was 7 years in the planning and originally intended to be held in Tel Aviv, Israel, but due to the political situation and safety concerns was moved to Istanbul just over a year prior to the symposium date.  The Gulf War and SARS made it look uncertain yet again only 3 months before the commencement with 50% of delegates dropping out, including all presenters and delegates from China.  Despite these difficulties the symposium went ahead and appeared to be a success with over 200 delegates making the trip from 50 countries. 

 

 

Figure 1: Istanbul Hilton Conference Centre, venue for IEEE 2003 International Symposium on EMC

 

The long planning phase was evident in the slickness of the symposia organisation and the smooth running of 3 conference halls, 3 workshop/tutorials, technical demonstrations and daily poster sessions, operating simultaneously alongside a small exhibition hall of EMC suppliers.  In total 380 papers/tutorials/workshops were available in the digest, selected from over 500 submissions, being presented over a 4 day period and covering almost all aspects of the EMC world. 

 

Opening Ceremony

The Lord Mayor of Istanbul, Mr. Ali M. Gürtuna, highlighted the importance of this international conference to Istanbul itself in his opening welcome address.  Before the Lord Mayors address Mr Elya Joffe explained some of the difficulties in organising the conference as outlined above. 

 

There were several IEEE committee members who were promoting their sectors, Don Heirman on the IEEE EMC standards, Arnie Braustein on the possible future of conferences in the Middle East. The most interesting IEEE presentation being a review of the IEEE EMC Transactions, this publication appears to be dominated by European authors (almost 50% of published papers).  The IEEE is trying to increase the content and reduce the submission-to-publication time, currently down from an average 8 months in 2000 to just under 6 months last year and the IEEE have introduced a web based review scheme to speed the process further.

 

The welcome speeches were then followed by a presentation by Nigel Carter of Qinetiq on Aircraft EMC, a theme of the conference being the 100th anniversary of the first powered flight by the Wright brothers.  For those who have heard Nigel Carter present before he was his usual ebullient and oft flippant self, some of his quips fell a bit flat on the international audience but he gave his usual high-flying performance.  The conclusion of the presentation being the problems still facing the aircraft industry in testing with high intensity radiated fields (HIRF) while maintaining some semblance of economic balance between cost and time for these tests.

 

Monday Sessions

The first sessions were short (2 hours) due to the opening ceremony taking up half of the morning.  Sessions included Human Exposure, Radar Cross Section, Powerline Communications, Antennas, Partial Element Equivalent Circuit Approach, Measurement Topics and Grounding Methods, the later attended by this delegate.

 

The grounding of chips and systems was presented as an open discussion forum, although it did include 3 presentations on grounding; a general presentation on the benefits or otherwise of single or multipoint grounding in PCB systems, a study of the effect of introducing a ground resistance to frame mounted equipment and most interesting a discussion on “ungrounded systems”.  The ungrounded system includes any battery or handheld system that does not connect to the mains-earth current return, hence it includes aircraft, mobile and many fixed-line phones and cars.  The subsequent discussion mainly revolved around methods of isolating grounds to avoid loops and benefits of ungrounded systems with respect to EFT and ESD phenomena.

 

The afternoon sessions continued with the theme of grounding for one of the sessions, but the others became more diverse, covering EM Hazards, EM Modelling, a demonstration of simulation methods, ESD, Avionic EMC, Auditing EMC labs and EMC Test Methods at which this author was presenting a paper on the effect of harness lengths on conducted emissions for automotive testing.  This was one of 3 automotive EMC related papers in this session, another on CISPR-25 set-up and an extremely interesting paper on double bulk current injection (DBCI) that proved to be able to correlate well with stripline and free field testing by using phase shift methods on the two BCI probes to produce induced harness currents replicating the wave effects in the other test techniques.  Other papers included use of amplitude probability distribution (APD) to estimate immunity levels for mobile communications and the generation of 200kA, 300kV pulse generator for lightning strike testing, the lack of mention of the safety systems making this appear to be a very frightening piece of equipment.  The paper on the effect of the test table material on high frequency (above 1GHz) testing made interesting reading in light of proposals to extend the upper test frequency of many standards to encompass high band GSM (1.8GHz) and wireless LAN and Bluetooth devices (2.4GHz).  Unfortunately the proposed use of a Styrofoam table does not make much sense for systems weighting more than a few kilograms.

 

Tuesday Sessions

The second day of the conference was a technical half-day as the organisers had arranged for a tour of Istanbul for all delegates in the afternoon. Sessions included personal devices on Aircraft, Human Exposure, test equipment, EMC in Systems, EMI Propagation, Standardisation and an all-encompassing Selected Topics session. 

 

The “Emissions and Immunity” session included an interesting paper on close field measurement of IC’s and PCB’s and relating this to field radiation at greater distances using current loops measurements only.  Another highlight of this session was a paper on DC corona discharge (partial discharge) and its EM characteristics, particularly relevant to end-of-life EMC of HV systems such as TV and monitor coils.  The “EMC in Systems” session included a look at functional safety in the railway environment, highlighting the growing importance of functional safety and EMC in the wider EMC community.  In the “Human Exposure” session a paper on the emitted near fields from mobile phones demonstrated fields up to 70V/m at very close proximity.  There were also 3 papers on the fields from base stations suggesting that the limits set in some countries for exposure are not being met by roof-top antennas in built-up areas under heavy traffic. There was an interesting analysis of both signal integrity and thermal performance of multi-point power plane stitching in the “Selected Topics” poster session showing significant improvement with via stitching and relating another topic (Thermal Analysis) that, like functional safety, is being consider in parallel with EMC performance more frequently.

 

Wednesday

The sessions continued in their diversity, covering High Power EM Transients, Spectrum Utilization, Worldwide EMF Exposure, EMC Training, ESD, Modelling, Biological Effects and the usual Selected Topics catchall.  The topics on EMF Exposure and Biological Effects would have particular reference to the debate currently running in the EMC and Compliance Journal on use of mobile phones within hospitals, as the results presented from these sessions would definitely defend the current status quo of not allowing their use due to high local field emissions and uncontrolled (by the user) emissions during registration.

 

The modelling sessions (there were several on simulation, modelling and numerical methods) covered a large range of applications, from PCB level and enclosure apertures, to complete chambers and even wireless propagation over different terrains.  The topics of component level EMC were also covered in a session on Microelectronic Devices which gave results to prove some of the simulation methods and modelling techniques were producing useful data down at the IC level and assisting with the design of low EMI generating devices and systems. 

 

EMC at the IC level is becoming an important area as EMC theory and practice is pushed down the electronic food chain.  As well as the simulation and above measurement papers, there were several papers on shielding products applicable to the IC and PCB level presented in the Advances in Shielding session.  It is no longer just the enclosure that is being touted as a shielding product, but some ferrite films are being developed for direct placement on both IC and/or PCB to provide significant shielding effectiveness (28dB in one case). 

 

In the evening all delegates and exhibitors were treated to a meal in the historic Binbirdirek Cistern (“The Cistern of 1001 Columns”, although the total number of columns was closer to 100), quite a spectacular setting for a formal meal and the IEEE conference awards ceremony followed by a Turkish folklore show. 

 

 

Figure 2: Mr Elya Joffe, the conference organiser, makes a special presentation to his family at the awards ceremony

 

Thursday

The exhibition did not extend into the final day and many delegates had left or made alternative arrangements for the final day.  There was some sense of conference fatigue and the poster sessions were not very well attended and could have been omitted entirely from this final day, especially in the afternoon when attendance had fallen to under 10 delegates in some of the technical sessions.  However, the technical programme was still full for the final day and included some excellent papers and workshops.

The sessions were much better focused on the final day, covering Cables and Interconnect, Intentional EMI, Modelling, Signal Integrity, Lightning, HF Coupling to name just a few.  The Signal Integrity session continued the microelectronics coverage from the previous day with excellent papers on Gigabit back plane design, a visualisation of IC level emissions by close field measurement and some simple PCB formulae for determining shielding effectiveness of vias.

EMC Education was covered quite a lot in the conference and the session on the final day presented some interesting projects from around the world on how EMC is taught in higher education.  EMC in short-range communications (e.g. Bluetooth, 802.11b) raised some interesting problems for future products, but as most current standards stop at the 1GHz frequency limit these higher frequency products main problem is interference with each other.

Overview

Without a doubt this was a well-organised and relatively well-attended event.  At $650 ($550 for presenters) it is even good value for money for a 4-day conference (including all lunches, a half-day tour and conference dinner) and Istanbul offers a range of relatively low cost accommodation and flights.  The conference proceedings were presented on CD-ROM only, which seemed a little cost-conscious, but when you consider a 380 paper binding (approximately 1000 printed pages) might take you over your luggage limit it makes sense in the end. 

 

The main problem I found with the conference was the lack of focus in some of the sessions, there were papers on Automotive EMC testing in the same sessions as statistical methods for mobile telephony limits and then papers on IC and PCB level EMC spread between 3 sessions all operating simultaneously. 

 

 

Figure 3: Presentation/papers by application area

 

 

Figure 4: Presentation/papers by test type applied or reported

 

There were a few very poor presentations and although the papers were reviewed there is a good argument for reviewing the presentations (one included over 30 slides of mainly mathematical equations to be presented in 20 minutes). The days of the all-encompassing EMC conference may be limited and there were rumours that the EMV Zurich conference is suffering and looking to combine with other European EMC conferences, although there were calls for papers on display for EMC Warsaw, EMC Europe in Eindhoven and EMC Japan, as well report on the growth of EMC interest in China in one of the free journals available.  With such a range of diverse topics it is difficult to gain a focused outcome from such a conference and there are fewer companies these days that will allow their staff as many as 4 days off-site to attend such an event.  University and Government research papers are dominating these extended conferences and this further reduces the appeal to practising engineers and their companies.  Some presenters and delegates did fly in for just a single day and many left before the symposium had concluded. 

My personal opinion is that shorter conferences, such as York EMC 2003, and more application oriented events, such as the IEE “EMC - Its all about the cabling” and Automotive EMC 2003, offer a better targeted approach, especially for design engineers working under tight deadlines and for smaller companies with limited training budgets.  I still do not believe that the presenters should be charged to attend on the day of their presentation at least.  Effectively the presenters are the un-paid workers at the conference and a reduction of $100 is a small discount for the amount of work that goes in to some of these papers (note: this is a personal issue and did not stop me attending this conference, although I did withdraw from the above IEE conference on this principle).

Overall a good EMC conference with some excellent papers, but would be improved with better focus in the sessions and probably in the daily technical orientation so that say Monday would focus on PCB/IC topics, Tuesday on Test Methods etc.