Press Release

PRESS RELEASE: Automotive EMC 2005 Programme Released On-Line

The annual Automotive EMC Conference programme has completed its review stage and is now available on-line at www.AutoEMC.net/Conference/2005. The authors and presenters this year come from a wide variety of suppliers to the automotive EMC and electronics market, including vehicle manufacturers, tier 1 component suppliers, test service suppliers, design consultancies, and aftermarket equipment manufacturers. For the first time the conference has attracted contributions from the USA and Canada, as well as the UK, France, Switzerland, Austria and of course the host country; Germany.

This year the conference sees a significant interest for the aftermarket supplier with 2 papers specifically examining this topic. One paper covers the latest changes in the EU Automotive EMC Directive (2004/104/EC) and how this will impact suppliers of aftermarket components, especially pertinent given the significance of the recent changes to this directive. The second paper examines the tests that are required to sell aftermarket components into the North American market, a topic often overlooked at European EMC conferences.

The vehicle manufacturer is well catered for as usual with, amongst several of direct interest, a paper covering a novel method of significantly reducing radiated emissions test time using a time-domain test method (total test time reduced to 20 minutes from a more usual whole day). There is an extremely interesting paper on testing the EMC of a CAN installation and identifying the most likely culprit of problems once the network is in-vehicle, a problem that is difficult to address using conventional techniques. This later paper should be of interest to many system integrators and module designers as well as the vehicle manufacturers.

Designers and system integrators could also improve the EMC of installed networks by considering the location of antennae on a vehicle and a paper on the simulation of these structures in-vehicle should provide a cost effective method of assessment. Telematics system designer should also pay attention to this paper as the results may provide clues to functional problems as well as EMC issues.

The EMC testing of vehicles and their components is examined in 3 very different papers covering high powered pulsed methods for radiated immunity, conducted immunity standards for both international and manufacturer requirements, and a quantitative assessment of the impact of the ground plane during susceptibility testing. The paper on using a pulsed technique for immunity testing demonstrates how very high fields (up to 600V/m) can be achieved using relatively low power, low cost amplifiers. The conducted immunity papers provides an overview of the different test standards currently used by both vehicle manufacturers and the international standards, where these are different and what changes have been recently introduced. The paper on susceptibility testing examines not only what non-idealities exist but also what fields are likely from realistic interference sources.

The conference programme offers a packed day of practical test methods, design techniques and integration strategies to ensure the optimum EMC performance of on-board electronics in a modern vehicle. No other EMC conference brings together the breadth of coverage, application depth and industry focus for the automotive electrical designer, test service provider and system integrator.