TABLE OF CONTENTS It may seem strange to devote no more than a few pages at the back of a book on product design for EMC to the important subject of computer-aided design (CAD). The prospect of non-compliance with EMC requirements is sufficiently threatening that manufacturers are having to give these requirements serious consideration at the design stage, and the second part of this book discusses the major design principles that this involves. Many other aspects of the circuit design process are now automated and simulated to the extent that a breadboard stage, to check the correctness of the basic design concepts, is often no longer necessary. A very attractive option to the product designer would be a CAD tool that predicted RF emissions and susceptibility, with enough accuracy for initial evaluation purposes, from the design data of the product. This would allow alternative EMC techniques to be tried out before the costly stage of committing to tooling and pre-production had begun.
The reason why this subject is relegated to an appendix is because no such tool yet exists. Many problems of a specific nature can be solved by electromagnetics computation packages that have been available for many years, but these generally address the needs of EMC experts rather than product designers. Several groups are working on the production of software packages that need less expertise for successful use, and the next few years may well see the successful introduction of such tools, but history does not give much cause for...
